


At a Glance

by Linsky



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Angst, First Time, High School, Long-Distance Relationship, Love at First Sight, M/M, Pen Pals, Pining, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 14:17:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 14
Words: 42,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4103932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linsky/pseuds/Linsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirk and Spock see each other for the first time when they are 15 and 17, respectively, and what happens is inevitable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Another early fic of mine! Having a lot of fun going back through the old things. :)
> 
> This is maybe slightly canon divergent? I made up a bunch of things that probably conflict with canon. Nothing happens that would prevent our favorite pair from ending up in their canon positions eventually, though.
> 
> (Note: If I had known Taylor Swift's Enchanted existed when I wrote this, I probably would have referenced it heavily.)

Jim had never seen so much red and gold in one place in all his fifteen years as he did at that moment in the main ballroom of Starfleet Headquarters. He didn’t have an officer’s tunic yet—he was stuck in his brother’s hand-me-down tux—but someday he would, if he had anything to say about it.

He took a bite of the salad that a waiter had just slid in front of him. His mother hadn’t had to argue too hard to get him to come with her to this annual Starfleet conference when she’d been offered a pair of free tickets. It was really much better suited to college Xenoculture professors like her than fifteen-year-old high school students, but Jim was an easy mark for anything Starfleet-related.

His mother was still talking to the person on her other side. Jim took another bite of salad and let his eyes wander the room. Most of the conference attendees at the opening banquet were human, but across the room he caught sight of a blue-skinned Andorian, and nearer at hand was a whole table full of Vulcans. Scientists or diplomats, Jim guessed, since as far as he knew, no Vulcan had ever joined the military.

One of the Vulcans was plainly younger than the others at the table. Jim had only ever seen Vulcan adults in person, and he wondered what this one was doing on Earth. The boy’s head was bent over his salad, so Jim could only see the edge of his features, but he guessed that he was maybe his own age or a little older. He was dressed in the same all-black outfit as the rest of the Vulcans, and what Jim could see of his features looked pleasant enough.

The Vulcan boy looked up, and their eyes met.

Instantly a stillness dropped over the room. It was as if everything around him had been paused, and nothing existed but that other pair of eyes. They were warm and brown, and they wore a look of surprise and openness that pierced him through. They seemed almost to be saying something, speaking words that Jim could not quite understand, no matter how much he wanted to. And he did want to—he wanted to hear the words those eyes were speaking more than he’d wanted anything else in his life.

His heart was beating faster than normal. Those eyes were making it hard to move, or breathe, or think. He thought maybe he was being rude, that maybe he should look away, but he could not. He was held in those eyes, in that look of surprise and seriousness and the promise of something more...

“Jim!”

He jumped, breaking the gaze. His mother’s hand was on his arm. He turned his head dazedly. From the look she was giving him, that probably wasn’t the first time she’d said his name.

“Jim, I want you to meet Admiral Tofte,” she said, indicating the man to her right.

Jim felt as if he were fighting to get out of a dream. There was a buzzing all through his head. “How do you do,” he said, extending his hand.

Admiral Toft made some other pleasantry, to which Jim managed an answer. Then his mother said something else to the Admiral, and Jim used the opportunity to get back to his salad and out of the conversation. He could not believe he was avoiding an opportunity to talk to a Starfleet admiral, but there was no help for it. Those eyes kept interpolating themselves between the world and his senses. 

That look...had he been imagining it? Had it really been nothing? It was crazy to think there had been some kind of connection there, in the eyes of strangers meeting across a room. He had to have been making the whole thing up. Didn’t he?

He raised his eyes just once, to check. The Vulcan was looking back at him. Their eyes met in a single, jolting instant of contact, and then the Vulcan’s eyes darted away, as if he hadn’t wanted to be caught looking. Jim felt his breath catch.

Heat was rising to his face. He looked back at his own table. He felt tumbled, disoriented, as if his world had mixed in a blender. The buzzing in his head was louder now. The roses in the centerpiece were a scrambled blur of color.

He needed to stop this. Jim gave himself a mental shake and took a long drink from his water glass. He did not need to look up again; he could ignore this. But the knowledge of the Vulcan boy’s presence off to the left was like pressure against the side of his body. Jim felt an overwhelming urge to raise his eyes and see if he could catch that glance again, see if he’d been imagining things—but he could control himself. He was stronger than this.

He lasted about thirty seconds before he looked up.

This time, the brown eyes were not looking at him. Jim felt a swoop of disappointment in his stomach. The Vulcan boy was in conversation with one of the adults at his table. Jim couldn’t tell what they were talking about, but they were looking at each other with the very formal expressions Vulcans always seemed to wear. Nothing like what Jim had seen in those eyes a few minutes earlier.

Jim took another sip of water and looked away. He felt slightly shaky and sick. This was crazy; he needed to stop being so melodramatic.

His salad was half gone. He couldn’t remember when he’d eaten so much of it, but he dug his fork back into it. His mother was still talking to the admiral, so there was no distracting himself with her. That made it very, very hard not to be conscious of the person sitting not thirty feet away from him.

He speared a tomato, chewed it, and then couldn’t resist. He darted his eyes up to look across the room.

The Vulcan was looking back again. There was another electric instant of eye contact, and this time it was Jim who moved his eyes away.

He lifted his hands to cover his flushed cheeks. He wanted something to hide behind, so that that gaze couldn’t penetrate him again—and at the same time, he wanted to meet it.

“Jim!” His mother was trying to get his attention again. “Are you all right?” she asked when he finally turned.

He managed a grin. “Of course.”

She looked at him closely. “Are you sure? You look a little flushed.”

“It is kind of warm in here,” he admitted. “Actually, would you mind if I got some air?”

“Of course not.” A little line of worry appeared between her eyebrows. “Don’t go far. You don’t want to miss dinner.”

Jim rose and pushed his chair in after him. He beat a retreat towards the door, trying not to be conscious of what eyes might or might not be on him.

Once the doors were shut behind him, he heaved a sigh of relief. It was as if a force had been removed from him—as if his muscles had been tensed against something, and now they could finally relax.

He took a few steps into the warm night air. There was just enough light spilling from the windows of the Starfleet complex for him to make out the shadowy edges of the grass on the lawn in front of him. He started walking across it—but as soon as he did, the pressure returned. This was a different sort of pressure from what he had been feeling inside: it was an anxiety now, a little nagging itch in the back of his brain that said he was missing out on something. It was bothering him not to be in the same room as the Vulcan boy with the warm brown eyes.

Jim bit down on his lower lip and walked faster, shoving his hands in his pockets. It wasn’t like him to get caught in his own head like this. He walked as if he could walk away from the nonsensical anxiety that seemed to have enveloped him, and when he reached the end of the lawn and that hadn’t happened, he had to turn around and walk back, more slowly now.

He paused before the doors. Part of him didn't want to go back into that ballroom and be subjected once more to the stomach-turning craziness. But a part of him did, and that part of him, aided by the very practical realization that he couldn’t stand out here on the lawn all night, won out. He went back through the doors.

Inside, it didn’t take long for his eyes to fly to the table of Vulcans. His Vulcan wasn’t looking up, though. Dinner had apparently been served, and the boy’s head was slightly inclined over his food so that most of what Jim could see was smooth dark hair. Jim wondered, just for a second, how that hair would feel to the touch.

He shook himself. His thoughts were crazy again. He threaded a path through the tables and sat down at his own, where a plate of steak and vegetables was waiting for him.

At least, he assumed it was steak. His first bite, therefore, was a surprise.

He looked up at his mother in dismay. It took her a second to read the question in his eyes, and then she laughed. “So you noticed, huh?”

“What is this stuff?” Kirk asked, holding up a piece on his fork. It didn’t have the proper grain for meat.

“Arvedian synthmeat,” his mother said. “Processed vegetables, actually. It’s supposed to be the best meat substitute in the galaxy.”

“But...why?” Kirk asked. It was just mean to put a juicy steak before a guy and then have it turn out to be nothing but vegetables.

“Not everyone here is a meat eater. Maybe the event organizers decided it would be more considerate to serve a vegetarian meal.” His mother took a bite of synthmeat with vegetables—a combination that was just redundant, to Jim’s mind.

He cut off a small piece of the “steak” and took a cautious bite. Actually, it wasn’t bad—if you expected vegetables instead of steak. It was way better than any vegetable Jim had ever had, anyway. And he supposed it did make sense, especially at a gathering where there would be whole species of people who didn’t eat meat—

Like the table of Vulcans. Suddenly Jim felt ashamed of his own reaction.

There was a clinking sound from the front of the room just then, and a voice came over the sound system welcoming them to the conference. Jim didn’t pay a lot of attention to the speeches that followed. They were mostly just welcomes from various Starfleet and Federation officials, and his nerves were wound way too tightly for him to pay attention.

The brown-eyed Vulcan at the other table seemed to be listening to them, though. Whenever Jim’s eyes went over to him, his gaze was trained on the speaker as if he were going to be quizzed on the content at the end of the evening. Probably it was a Vulcan etiquette thing. Jim spent most of his time during the speeches trying to stop looking over at him; it was just plain torturous to keep looking and never see anyone looking back. But he didn’t seem able to stop himself. By the time the speeches were over and the orchestra began to play, he was ready to stab his eyeballs out with a fork.

Couples started drifting out onto the dance floor then. Jim watched them to distract himself from looking elsewhere. Most of the couples were older, but a few of them were younger, maybe even Jim’s age—other teenagers who’d come along with their parents. Soon enough, his mother was whisked off by some government official.

Jim did not feel like dancing. He could usually manage it all right, even the boring ballroom stuff, thanks to a few years of very unfortunate and non-optional lessons back in middle school, but it held no appeal for him tonight. All he really wanted to do was get out of here and find a place where he could reclaim his sanity. But that wasn’t going to be an option for the next few hours, so he stood up and stretched and strolled away from his table.

At first he told himself he wasn’t going anywhere in particular. He just wanted to stretch his legs, and so he ambled toward the wall of the room and stood there for a while, watching the dancers. But of course he knew where he wanted to go.

The Vulcan whose gaze he had met was still sitting at his table. Jim was aware of this, of course, as much as he was aware of the fact that the lights were on and that there was oxygen in the room. Most of the others at that table had left, so that there were more empty spaces than full. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to go up and sit down next to him...

The very thought made his stomach flip in panic. There was absolutely no reason for it, but the idea of sitting down next to the Vulcan left him absolutely petrified. He didn't think he could even walk in that direction without his feet forgetting how to work and making him fall in a heap.

Jim leaned against the wall and jammed his hands into his pockets. This was stupid. He had to get over this. If he could just go up and talk to this guy, then maybe the crazy obsession would stop. He counted five deep breaths and tried to put the thought out of his mind, in case he could trick himself into doing it without thinking about it. He was so focused on not thinking, in fact, that he didn’t notice the person beside him until a touch on his arm made him jump.

“Oh, sorry.” There was a girl there, looking at him with a tentative smile on her face. “I was, um, wondering if you wanted to dance?”

Jim looked at her blankly. The idea was so foreign to his thoughts right then that at first he couldn’t even understand it. “Um...”

The girl looked terrified by his hesitation. “Never mind, forget about it!” she said in a squeak, and turned and rushed away through the crowd.

Jim winced and mentally smacked himself on the forehead. He could at least have been polite to her. Where was the Jim Kirk who was so good at charming girls? She had been pretty, too.

He looked to see if he could find her to apologize, but she was long gone. His eyes cut back to the Vulcan’s table.

The seat he’d been looking at all night was empty. Jim stared at it in shock. Somehow he’d taken it for granted that the Vulcan would stay where he was until Jim worked up the nerve to go up to him. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.

He scanned left, right, peering at all the faces in the crowd. No sign of him.

Jim heaved a sigh and ran his hands through his hair. What the heck was happening to him? He wasn’t usually this crazy. What he should do was find some other nice girl, one he hadn’t already scared off, and go dance with her until he forgot about this weird new obsession of his.

But somehow, though he told himself to scan the crowd to find a girl to dance with, his eyes were not obeying him. They rested not on the female faces but on the male faces, those with dark hair and a hint of slant in the eyebrows, trying to make the features match a certain set. Plenty of times he thought he saw the right face at the edge of his vision, but when he turned to see, it was just another anonymous dark-haired human.

Finally Jim couldn’t take it anymore. He turned his back on the dance floor, headed toward the first door he saw, and went through it.

This door did not lead outside. Instead Jim found himself in a half-lit hallway. He let the door close behind him and sighed in relief as the noise of the ballroom was suddenly muffled.

There were plenty of other doors along the hallway. He went up to the first one that didn’t seem to lead back into the ballroom and tried the knob.

Unlocked. Jim opened it to see a dark lecture hall of some kind. Good enough. He flipped a switch by the door, and a row of lights came on and bathed the ten feet at the front of the room in a comfortable yellow glow. Beyond that, rows of shadowy seats rose up and up.

Jim went to the center of the half-lit room. There was a big presentation table under the lights, and he leaned against it. He put his head in his hands and scrunched his eyelids together. Everything seemed to be all jumbled up inside of him, so that no thought or feeling was distinguishable from the others. It was all in a tangled mass.

The faint sounds of formal dance music came through the back wall of the room, muffled but easily audible. Jim let the stately rhythms wash over him until some of the anxious feeling left his stomach. His thoughts were moving no more freely, but at least his tension level was lower.

What he needed to do was find a touchstone, something that would make him feel like himself again. There was a blackboard behind the table. He picked up the chalk and started sketching.

A few minutes later he was so absorbed in his drawing that the click of the door opening made him jump about five feet. He looked over just in time to see it swing open to reveal—his Vulcan.


	2. Chapter 2

It was the same boy Jim had locked eyes with, unmistakably so. Even in the dim light by the door, Jim recognized the shape of that face. The Vulcan boy didn’t seem to have noticed Jim yet, though. He shut the door behind him and took several steps into the room. Then he lifted his eyes and gave a visible start.

He backed up a few paces. “I—apologize,” he said. “I believed this room to be empty.”

He looked flustered. Jim had never seen a Vulcan look anything other than perfectly composed. “Nope, sorry,” Jim managed to say.

The Vulcan stood still, seemingly at a loss. “I—I was looking for a quiet place away from the party.”

“Well, you’ve found one,” Jim heard himself saying. He wasn’t really thinking about what he was saying; the important thing was to keep this boy in the room.

The Vulcan’s hand paused on the way to the doorknob. “You do not mind if I stay?”

“Of course not,” Jim said. He forced his thoughts to start moving again. What should he be saying? Introductions. They should introduce themselves.

“I’m Jim,” he said. “Jim Kirk.”

“Spock,” the other boy said. He walked forward and held up his hand in the Vulcan ta’al just as Jim extended his own for a handshake. Jim quickly switched, but Spock did the same thing, so that his hand extended just as Jim’s went up in the ta’al.

Jim laughed and dropped his hand, then held it out it for a handshake. “Let’s just do it this way,” he said.

Spock took his hand in a firm grasp. His skin was surprisingly warm against Jim’s. His eyes were not as open as they had looked earlier, when their gazes had first met, but neither were they the closed mask Vulcans so often seemed to wear. They were just a little guarded. Shy, maybe. But they found Jim’s and held them while they shook hands.

When their hands dropped, Jim jumped up so that he was sitting on the table behind him. Somehow this position helped calm the flutters that were racing through his stomach. “So, not a fan of parties?” he asked, for the sake of having something to say.

“I confess that I do not enjoy them as much as I might,” Spock said. His hands hung by his sides. “I assume I can draw the same conclusion about you?”

He looked so awkward, standing there in front of Jim, that Jim felt guilty about his own position and jumped back down. “Actually, I usually like them,” he said. “I think this one just got to be a little much.”

Spock nodded, and a silence descended between them. Jim scuffed his heel against the base of the desk. He wanted to say something else, but he couldn’t think of anything. What did you say to someone you knew nothing about?

Spock’s eyes were wandering. Jim was afraid that he was bored, that he was going to leave, but then he noticed that his gaze was riveted to something over Jim’s shoulder. “What were you drawing?” he asked.

“Oh,” Jim said in relief at having something to talk about. He had forgotten about the drawing. “Well, um, actually, I was just working on plans for my tree house.”

Spock raised one eyebrow. It was quite a pronounced gesture, and it broke his face out of its look of shyness. “A house that is also a tree? I am not sure I understand the concept.”

“Come on, you’ve never seen a movie or something with a tree house in it?” Jim asked.

Spock turned to look at the blackboard in consternation, as if it might reveal the secret to him. “I am afraid that I have not.”

“Oh. Well, it’s not that complicated,” Jim said. He went and stood next to Spock in front of the board. “It’s just like a house, except instead of being on the ground, it’s in a tree. You have to climb up to get to it, and all of the floors and walls and everything are supported by branches.”

Spock considered this. “Do you have a shortage of ground space in your home city?”

This struck Jim as so funny that he burst out laughing. It felt so good to laugh, after an evening of frayed nerves. “Sorry,” he said, when he finally managed to subdue himself. “It’s just that tree houses aren’t really meant for a practical purpose like that. They’re just for fun.”

Spock’s eyes met Jim’s. Jim found himself the sudden recipient of the same focused gaze that had been turned on the board. “I do not understand,” Spock said, in such a way that Jim knew he wanted him to explain.

How to explain the wonder of a tree house? “It’s not a house for living in on a day-to-day basis,” Jim said. “It’s for...well,” he faltered, “haven’t you ever wished for someplace that’s just yours, high above the ground? That’s what a tree house is for. It’s...a place to escape to, where you can live in another world that’s completely separate from what happens on the ground. You can be...hidden in the sky.”

Jim felt himself flush. He had let himself get carried away. But Spock was looking at him with an expression that told him that yes, he knew what it was to wish for such a thing. “I understand now,” he said. “Please, tell me about your tree house, Jim.”

Jim turned back to the blackboard and tried to quell his nerves. Why did this boy make him feel so self-conscious? “Well,” he said. “Normally, tree houses are just a platform of wood among the branches, maybe with a railing or something. That’s still pretty cool. But mine is going to be much cooler than that.”

He used the chalk as a pointer. “See, this is the big maple behind my house. I’m going to build the first platform here, about ten feet off the ground, but then I’ll have a set of steps—here—that will wind around this branch and lead to the second platform. That one will have a roof over it, for when it rains, and walls on three sides.”

“And a window, I assume,” Spock said.

“A window?”

He nodded. “So that you will be able to remember that you are in a tree.”

He said it so earnestly that Jim smiled. Spock didn’t seem to notice the smile. He had stepped close to the diagram and was studying it, as if it were a project that he had to get just right. “You will need some means of getting materials up to the first platform while building the second,” he said. “I recommend a pulley system—here.” He took another piece of chalk and sketched out a bucket contraption on a rope. “You will, of course, have to climb down to refill the bucket between loads.”

“Unavoidable,” Jim said through his grin. He was finding Spock’s seriousness highly amusing. He jumped back up onto the table and sat with his legs swinging.

“With this level of technology, yes,” Spock agreed. He was still focused on the board. “You would have to move far beyond simple machines if you wished the bucket to be self-filling. Unless, of course, you are transporting something uniform and easily divisible, like sand.”

“Naturally,” Jim said.

Spock straightened up and considered the other branches. “Have you considered a second platform at the higher level?”

“What for?” Jim asked.

“Because then you could connect them with a bridge,” Spock said.

Jim felt his face light up in a smile. He stopped swinging his legs. From that one sentence, he knew that Spock understood the purpose of a tree house far better than he had ever expected. Here was a Vulcan proposing a bridge in a tree house. Jim jumped down from the table.

“I could build it over here,” he said, sketching with the chalk. “Then the only way to get to it would be by the bridge.”

“A hanging bridge,” Spock suggested.

“Of course,” Jim agreed. He sketched it in, with its middle curving downward and two rope handrails on either side. “We’ll move the other platform farther over so that it’s a real bridge.”

Spock considered his drawing. “I do not know that these branches will support a platform so far out,” he said.

“Well, it’s not drawn to scale,” Jim said.

Spock turned to him with a single eyebrow raised with such sternness that if it hadn’t been for the sparkle in his eyes, Jim might have taken his scorn seriously. Instead he burst out laughing. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a great sense of humor?”

Spock turned back to the blackboard, but Jim could have sworn he saw his lips quirk. “It has not often been mentioned.” He studied the drawing for a minute. “Have you considered a tower farther up?”

“Yeah. I don’t think the branches are strong enough.”

“In that case, you must leave the second platform open to the sky,” Spock said.

“Why?” Jim asked.

Spock turned to look at him with just the slightest hint of shyness in his eyes. “So that you can look up at the stars,” he said.

Jim looked back for a long moment. He felt as if the floor of the room might not be entirely steady. The buzzing feeling was back in his head.

“Are all Vulcans like this?” he asked.

Spock’s eyes dropped. A change came instantly over his body: a stiffness that made his limbs look sharper than they were. He started to turn away.

“No, don’t go!” Jim reached out a hand to take his arm, thought the better of it, and let his hand drop. He had no idea why Spock had taken offense, but he wished he could take it back. “I’m sorry. I just meant that I really loved your ideas.”

Spock turned back. The tension still lived in his body, but he raised his eyes to meet Jim’s again, and then he looked at the blackboard. “You are quite talented at drawing plans,” he said. “Have you considered a career as an architect?”

“No,” Jim said, hoping his relief wasn’t too evident in his voice. Spock wasn’t leaving. “I’m going to join Starfleet. That is, if I can get into the Academy.”

Spock nodded. “I hear that it is quite competitive.”

“Yeah.” Jim moved away from the board. There was a ledge about a foot and a half high right beneath the point where the chairs started. He crossed to it and sat down, tucking one leg up under him so that he was sitting sideways. Spock followed and sat down as well, facing him. “It’s tough. You can get perfect grades and still not get in, if they don’t think you’re the right kind of person.”

“I am certain you will not have any trouble,” Spock said.

Jim felt a smile spread on his face and tried to keep it from being too ridiculously wide. “How about you? Do you know what you want to do?”

“I am still in my final year of secondary school,” Spock said. “At this year’s end, when I am eighteen, I will be applying for admittance to the Vulcan Science Academy.”

Jim had heard of it—it was the premier science institution on Vulcan, if not in the galaxy. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that science is your thing,” he said, tilting his head to gesture toward the blackboard. “Any particular subject?”

“I have not yet decided,” Spock said. “I am quite interested in Xenobiology, but I also find Physics to be quite alluring.”

“Alluring?” Jim grinned. “That’s a word you usually don’t hear applied to Physics.”

Spock unclasped his hands and opened them as if he were trying to hold something. “It deals with the fundamental properties of the universe,” he said. “I find myself drawn to it for that reason. It...touches the roots of existence itself.”

Jim could see the planes of his face softened by the shadows that hung where they sat at the edge of the pool of light. There was something reverent in the tone of his voice. Jim found that he was pulled into its hush. The seriousness of this moment was strong, like wine, and he felt it rising to his head. It was transformed into joy, and he had to laugh once from pure happiness.

Spock looked up, startled. Jim spread his hands to encompass the room by way of explanation. “I’m sorry. It’s just...don’t you think our party is a lot better than the real one?” he asked.

Spock’s eyebrow rose again, in that high and elegant line. “Indeed?”

“Sure.” Jim said. “Much more entertaining.”

Spock cocked his head. “I do not know,” he said slowly. “It is somewhat lacking in the area of food.”

“Oh. Sorry about that.” Jim tossed him the chalk he was still holding in one hand. “Here. Help yourself.”

Spock held up the piece of chalk and pretended to consider it seriously. “I am afraid chalk is not an adequate source of nourishment for the Vulcan system.”

“Mm, I forgot—humans are far superior in that area.”

“Then I must fault your party for lack of food suitable for Vulcans,” Spock said.

“Damn it,” Jim said. “When did it become my party?”

“Similarly, the music is rather muffled, and there seems to be an acute lack of dancing,” Spock continued.

Jim leaned back on his arms. “Eh. Highly overrated, wouldn’t you say?”

“Dancing?” Spock repeated. “I am afraid I do not have the necessary data to form an opinion.”

It took a second for Kirk to parse that. “What, you mean you’ve never danced before?”

“Your assessment is correct,” Spock said.

Kirk sat up. “But...you’ve danced at some point, right? I mean, maybe not like they’re doing in there, but...I mean, some kind of dancing, right?”

Spock raised an eyebrow. “I fear you have an inadequate comprehension of the word ‘never,’” he said.

Kirk laughed. “Wow. Well, you’re in luck, because I have four semesters of Madam Pinchet’s ballroom lessons under my belt, and that makes me a more than qualified teacher.” He leapt up and plucked the chalk out of Spock’s fingers before crossing to the blackboard and starting to draw.

“What are you drawing?” Spock’s voice came from right above his shoulder, closer than Jim had expected. Jim didn’t turn around. He drew in the last few arrows, and then dusted his hands together to remove the chalk.

“That, my friend,” he said, “is the box step.”

He stepped back to see Spock looking dubiously at it.

“It’s for a waltz. Any song in three,” Jim clarified. “Like the one playing now. This is a diagram of how you move your feet.”

Spock was looking at the blackboard with his head cocked. “You are certain you have not drawn something else in error?”

“Oh, shut up,” Jim said. “Watch me.”

He executed a box step in time with the music coming through the wall, taking care to face one direction the whole time. Then he stepped back. “Now you.”

Spock studied the diagram for another moment, then placed his feet in the starting position. He moved them forward in perfect time with the music, but on the way back, he somehow crossed one foot over the other, so that before Jim could tell what was happening, his feet had tangled so badly that he pitched forward onto the floor.

He looked up from his position on the floor with one eyebrow raised. “I seem to be somewhat deficient in technique,” he said.

Jim was laughing too hard to respond, or, for that matter, to breathe. “It’s—not that—hard,” he gasped through his laughter.

Spock was still on the floor with a slightly miffed expression on his face. Jim reached out a hand to help him up. “Sorry,” he said, though he suspected that he damaged the effect of his apology by smiling broadly. “It goes like this.”

He led Spock through a few more iterations until the Vulcan could do it without reference to the diagram or to Jim. Then Jim stepped back to watch him do it a few times. Despite his initial difficulty, he moved smoothly through the steps.

Finally he stopped. “I confess I still do not see the purpose of this dance,” he said.

“Well, you’re not really doing it yet,” Jim said. “Those are just the bare bones.”

The orchestra had struck up another waltz, slightly livelier this time. “Here.” Jim positioned himself in front of Spock. “Sorry, you’ll have to be the girl, since I don’t think you’re up to leading yet. It’s not that hard to switch, though—you just do the opposite of all the steps.”

If Spock had looked skeptical when presented with the box step diagram, it was nothing to how he looked now. “What precisely are you doing?” he asked in an alarmed tone.

“Teaching you to dance, of course,” Jim said. Spock’s expression made him grin. It was pretty clear Spock wasn’t going move on his own, so Jim took Spock’s right hand with his left and moved his other hand into position. “See, this hand goes on my shoulder. My arm goes right under yours, so I can use my elbow to steer you.”

Spock’s eyebrows were about to lift off his head. “Steer me?”

Jim couldn’t help but laugh. He had been half afraid that Spock would pull away, but he stayed in position, his hand clasped in Jim’s, their other arms together. “Now,” Jim said, feeling slightly lightheaded. “Whenever I step forward, you step back, and vice versa.”

For all Spock’s ineptitude at learning the box step, he hard remarkably little trouble translating it into a dance—or following a lead, for that matter. Soon they were spinning around with the one-two-three of the orchestra. Jim felt strangely euphoric as they spun across the floor. The music seemed to be lifting him up, and Spock moved with him like an extension of his own body.

“You’re sure you’ve never danced before?” he asked while they spun.

“I have not,” Spock said. “Perhaps it is easier than you think.”

In response, Jim sped them up, so that they were twirling at a dizzying speed around the little lighted area. Spock kept up, even if there were a few near misses with the walls and the table. Finally Jim had to stop them, laughing.

Spock looked down at him. “Still,” he said, “remarkably easy.”

Jim looked up, still laughing, ready to retort, but the words seemed to melt away when he caught Spock’s gaze. His laughter died.

“Yeah,” he managed to say. “I guess it was.”

They had not moved out of their dancing position. They were just swaying slightly now, revolving slowly with the music. Spock’s eyes were impossibly deep. How could one set of eyes have such a range of expressions? Jim finally had to break the gaze out of the sheer intensity of it. He looked down, over Spock’s right shoulder. Somehow, without noticing it, he had pulled their clasped hands in to rest on his chest. His moved his other hand further towards the center of Spock’s back so that his forearm was anchored firmly against it.

Spock’s body was so close. Jim could feel its nearness all along his own, as easily as he could feel his own tongue against his teeth. It seemed to give off a heat that warmed his skin.

Spock’s shoulder was right below his chin. Their heads were maybe an inch apart from each other. Giving in to temptation so mighty he felt as if all the world were screaming for it, Jim lowered his head and rested his cheek on the curve of Spock’s shoulder.

Spock did not pull away. Instead Jim felt the tickle of breath on the side of his neck, and then a nose touched softly against his skin and sent a tingle all through him. He closed his eyes and clenched Spock’s hand tighter in his own. Spock’s thumb stroked against the back of his hand.

Jim felt his breath catch at that small motion. Something warm and live had come to dwell inside his chest, heating and soothing him all through and making this a place he did not want to leave. He moved his head closer to Spock’s and raised it slightly so that their two cheeks rubbed together. Then he pulled back until he found Spock’s mouth.

The first touch of their lips was soft and sweet. Oh, so sweet. Spock’s chest was flush with his. A firm chest, none of the soft curves he was used to, but it sent warmth straight to his loins. Spock’s lips moved against his. Then they parted slightly, and Jim caught the first scent of Spock’s breath. It made something inside him jolt. He put his tongue out and ran it along Spock’s lower lip.

Spock moaned. The Vulcan Jim had seen across a ballroom that evening moaned at the touch of Kirk’s tongue on his lip. Jim pressed closer, drinking of Spock’s mouth. His tongue ventured farther in, stroking along Spock’s tongue and pulling a moan deep out of his own chest. Their hands, still clasped together, fell down to their sides, and then came apart so that their arms could hold each other. Spock’s arms were warm, close, firm around Jim’s back. He was being held by Spock, Spock of the deep brown eyes and the understanding of rope bridges and stars and the face that said so much while saying so little. He kissed him so hungrily it was amazing they could both breathe.

The doorknob rattled and they sprang instantly, abruptly apart. “Spock!” a male voice called from the hall.

Jim’s eyes flew to Spock’s. They were both breathing heavily from the kiss. “Coming, Father,” Spock replied in a voice that Jim would not have expected to carry beyond the doors. But then he remembered how well Vulcans could hear. Anything he said to Spock right now, Spock’s father would hear.

He looked at Spock silently. Spock held his gaze, and took his hand fleetingly. Then he turned and walked quickly from the room.


	3. Chapter 3

The classroom door clicked shut behind Spock, and Jim was alone. He sank down on the ledge and took in a great shuddering breath. The warmth that had come to live in him during Spock’s embrace still coursed through his veins. As did the sound of Spock’s voice as he talked about the building blocks of the universe, the look on his face when he spoke of watching the stars, the electricity that had snapped into place between them at that first look in the ballroom...

What was this? Jim was reeling, unable to understand, unable to think very far beyond the haze that surrounded him. This was... 

His hands gripped the edge of the ledge. The singing all along his skin crowded out the possibility of thought. For a few minutes he sat still on the ledge, and then, almost without noticing, he got up and drifted towards the hall. It was as if someone had shoved cotton batting in his arms and legs and brain: the whole world seemed to bounce dimly off him. All that was not Spock had very little meaning right now.

The ballroom was loud enough to shock him out of that state a bit. He opened the doors and winced at wave of sound. There was really only one thing he wanted out of that ballroom at that moment, and as he looked around, he had to admit that it wasn’t there. Wherever Spock’s father had taken him, it wasn’t back here.

Probably to their rooms, Jim thought. That meant an entire evening, and entire night following, until he would be able to see Spock. That is, if Spock were planning to be at breakfast.

Spock would be at breakfast. If not, Jim didn’t know what he would do.

He went back to the table where he’d had dinner, the ballroom colors and noises spilling all around him and leaving him untouched. He’d barely sat down when the sound of his name cut through his daze.

“Jim!” His mother was coming up to the table. “Where were you? I haven’t seen you for hours.”

Jim tried to transition his brain back into making-excuses-to-mother mode. “Um, sorry,” he said. “I, uh, went outside for a while.”

His mother gave him a look that was only about half stern. “There was a girl, wasn’t there?”

Jim couldn’t stop the blood rising to his cheeks. He could tell that she saw, because she smiled grudgingly. “Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” she said. “But I think it’s about time for us to turn in.”

She made him sit at the table while she said goodbye to a few people, because, she said, she didn’t want him to “turn up lost again.” Jim sat and felt his mind buzz. Spock, it said; Spock. Spock, how it had felt to hold him, to see his eyebrow rise, to whirl across the floor with him in his arms....

He saw his mother returning, and he worked to wipe the silly expression off his face.

They were staying in the hotel across the street. Jim trailed after his mother into the lobby, where she had to go talk to one of the bellhops about their luggage. Jim took advantage of the interval to go up to the front desk.

“Excuse me,” he said.

A pretty woman with blonde hair and bright red lipstick looked up. She was maybe ten years older than Jim, and she smiled at him as if he were a small child. “Yes, young man?”

He suppressed the annoyance produced by her expression. “I was wondering if there was a Starfleet conference attendee named Spock staying at this hotel.”

She clicked away on her computer for a moment. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “Is it possible he’s someone’s guest?”

Of course—he would be registered under his parents’ names. Which Jim didn’t know. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to find him without the name of the primary registree,” the woman said. “Is this in regard to something important?”

“No,” he lied. “Thanks anyway.”

He walked back to the lobby couches to wait for his mom. How had he not found out Spock’s parents’ names? He knew what Spock wanted to do with his life, how he felt about the fundamental components of the universe, but not what he was doing here on Earth right now.

And what were you going to do, Jim? he asked himself. Knock on his door, hope he’s staying alone, and fall into his arms?

That did sound about right.

His mother came back across the lobby at last, brushing her hands together. “That’ll teach them to send our luggage to the ophthalmology conference,” she said. Jim must have been displaying some of what he felt on his face, because she paused and looked at him harder. “What’s going on?”

“Oh. Nothing,” he said. “Sorry, I’m just really tired.”

“All right,” she said, though he didn’t think she believed him. She reached out and smoothed his hair. “It’s been a long evening. Let’s go find our rooms.”

***

Thanks to their free conference tickets, Jim had a room of his own. He wandered around it for a few minutes, absentmindedly trailing his fingers over all the surfaces. But he didn’t really want to be inside. And the room had a balcony.

Outside, there was only the light-studded darkness of the city all around him. Jim stood against the railing of his eleventh-floor room and looked down at the twinkling lights far below.

Somewhere out there was Spock, and that thought was brighter than all the lights in the world.

Jim grinned into the darkness. It was crazy—he had only known Spock for a few hours. How had he come to feel about him the way he was pretty sure he’d never felt about anyone before? Certainly no guy. Jim had never had a thing for a guy before—not once. He had watched the girls at school, admired the curves of their breasts, fondled some of those breasts in the backs of borrowed parents’ cars, enjoyed every minute of it. And now his mind was revolving endlessly on the feel of Spock’s lips on his own.

His eyes closed at the very thought of it. There was no point in overthinking this: it was obvious how he felt. He might be standing alone in the darkness at the moment, but there was a warm kernel in his chest that was Spock holding him and kissing him back.

The morning, Jim thought, could not come quickly enough.

 

To his astonishment, he did eventually go to sleep that night. It was a long time coming: a long time spent lying in the dark feeling happy and excited and anxious and impatient all at once. But finally he fell into a sleep that was surprisingly deep, so that when he woke in the early-morning sunlight he had a few moments of wonderful languor before his brain whispered a name to him.

Spock. The thought made him spring out of bed before his alarm went off. He got ready in what had to be record time and pulled out his packet of conference information. Breakfast started at 8:00 in the officers’ mess, and he had a feeling Spock would be there right on time.

There was a knock on the door just as Jim was skimming the program for the day. “Jim?” his mother called. “Are you up?”

“Yeah,” he called back. He grabbed his packet and hotel key and went to open the door. “Up and ready to go,” he said.

“Is that your schedule?” His mother took it from his hand and compared it with her own. She frowned. “Hmm. They haven’t put us in anything together.”

“That’s okay,” he said.

She did not look as though it was okay with her. “You’d think they’d at least have the common courtesy to put a mother and son in some of the same programs,” she said. “Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own all day?”

Jim rolled his eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

She pursed her lips but seemed resigned to it. Jim worked hard not to laugh at his good luck. “Are we going to breakfast?” he asked.

“I can’t,” she said. “I have an early-morning seminar. Do you know how to find the officers’ mess?”

He gave her a look.

“All right, all right, of course you do,” she said. She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Be careful today.”

“I will,” he called as he headed down the hall just a little too fast for normalcy.

Actually, as it turned out, Jim did not know how to find the officers’ mess, but he did know how to ask people until he figured it out. Finally he came through a set of doors that led to a large room full of people eating breakfast at long rows of tables.

It took about three seconds after he entered the room for his eyes to come to rest on a particular head of dark hair and a pair of pointed ears.

Jim felt adrenaline rush through his limbs. All of a sudden, looking at that head, he wondered if he had been crazy. What if Spock didn’t feel anything like what he did? What if they had just fallen into a kiss because—because Spock was drunk, or confused, or didn’t care who he kissed? What if...

Spock hadn’t seen him yet. Jim told himself to chill out and started walking towards him, trying not to be too unsteady on his feet. He slid into the empty seat across from him with a nervous smile. “Hey,” he said.

Spock looked up from his oatmeal. Kirk watched as his face was transformed: it went from the stoic mask of a Vulcan to something infinitely softer, warmer, more open. A second later the expression was muted, made more fitting for public consumption, but Kirk had seen everything he needed to know. The fear inside him melted away, and he felt his face break into a real, broad smile of its own volition.

“Jim,” Spock said softly by way of greeting.

Jim leaned forward, elbows on the table. He was trying to keep his smile down to reasonable proportions, but he was failing. “How was your night?” he asked.

“It was...not as restful as most,” Spock said. “But I find I have no wish to complain about it.”

Jim felt like the look in Spock’s eyes might fill him up to bursting. He could sit and look all day. “Same here,” he said.

“Do you not wish to eat anything?” Spock asked.

“Not right now, no,” Kirk said. Not when Spock was looking at him like that.

Spock’s eyes relaxed a fraction further, and for a long moment they simply looked at each other. Kirk felt almost giddy again. He wanted to reach across, to touch, but he had a feeling Spock wouldn’t appreciate that in public. He clasped his hands together on the table.

“What is next on your schedule?” Spock asked him.

“Um,” Kirk said, pulling his mind away from its object of contemplation. “A panel on the future of warp-speed travel, I think.”

“Would you object very strongly to missing it?” Spock asked, lowering his voice in a way that would have made Kirk give up his next three birthdays if Spock had asked.

“Not in the slightest,” he said.

***

Much to Jim’s chagrin, Spock wouldn’t let them leave the mess until he had gotten some food. “I do not wish to have an incapacitated human on my hands,” he explained. Jim grinned at the double entendre, and a second later Spock caught it and blushed a faint green. The sight was strangely compelling.

Jim ended up gulping down some toast with jam. “Your parents aren’t expecting you to be around today?” he asked when they got up to clear their plates.

“My father is not scheduled for any events with me,” Spock said. “My mother is not attending the conference. She has gone to visit family in Vermont.”

“Your mother has family on earth?” Jim asked.

“She is human,” Spock explained. “I am of mixed heritage.”

Jim looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t realize.”

“My parents chose for my physique to be primarily Vulcan,” Spock said. They had reached the tray return, and they lowered their trays on the moving belt that would take them back into the kitchen. “There are only a few abnormalities that point to my heritage.”

Jim couldn’t see his face, but he heard the slight tension in his voice. He remembered Spock’s reaction the day before, when Jim had asked if all Vulcans were like him. Jim wished he could go back in time and kick himself to make himself shut up. Instead he touched his fingertips very lightly to Spock’s elbow as they made their way towards the exit. Spock glanced at him in surprise and gratitude.

He let his fingers drop before it became too obvious. They pushed their way through the other conference goers and emerged into the hallway.

“So,” Jim said, stopping just to the side of the doors, out of the way of others who might want to pass. “What do you want to do with the day?”

They were standing fairly close, trying to stay out of the way of people going through the doors. “I...I find that I wish to...” Spock trailed off. His voice sounded distracted. His eyes were resting on Jim’s face, drifting down to his mouth. Jim could feel a wave of desire all along his own body, as if an electrical field were connecting it with Spock’s. The scent of Spock’s breath gushed over him. He could have leaned in an inch or two and kissed him right then.

“Come on,” he said. He put two fingers back on Spock’s elbow and guided him to the staircase at the end of the hall and up to the next floor.

There were far fewer people up here. Jim tried the first door they came to, conscious of Spock beside him, breathing fast. He flipped the light switch inside to reveal a small equipment storage room. No windows, and no people in sight. “Perfect,” he said, and Spock made an impatient sound.

The door was no sooner shut than Spock was in his arms. Their mouths came together in a kiss that made Jim gasp. The warmth of Spock against him spread through his body. He stroked their tongues together and heard Spock moan.

It was several minutes before their mouths finally separated. When they did, Jim put his head on Spock’s shoulder and held him close. “Is it weird that I missed you?” he asked.

Spock turned his head and pressed his lips against Jim’s neck. It felt soft, warm, and sent a tingle down his spine. “If it is abnormal, then it is an abnormality that I have suffered from as well.”

Jim held him tighter for that. Then he pulled his head back so that he could look at Spock There was the softness in Spock’s face that he looked for now. “This is so crazy,” he said. “How did this happen?”

Spock’s hands cupped one of Kirk’s cheeks. He leaned into the feeling. “I do not know,” Spock said. “I do not fully comprehend our responses to each other. However, I find myself strangely untroubled by that fact.”

Kirk wasn’t troubled by anything, not while Spock was in his arms. He smiled into Spock’s eyes. Spock trailed his fingers over Kirk’s cheek, up to his forehead, and back down. “You wear your thoughts very clearly on your face,” Spock said in a low voice. 

Kirk closed his eyes and enjoyed the stroking fingers. He wasn’t expecting it when Spock leaned in to kiss him again. But he felt himself sink into Spock’s mouth.

For long minutes after that, there was nothing but kissing, nothing but Spock’s mouth and lips and tongue and arms and hands against him. Kirk felt as if he were being wrapped in a dream.

When they came up for air again, Kirk looked around at the storage room and chuckled. He had forgotten where they were. He saw the corners of Spock’s eyes crinkle in amusement.

“So, what do you want to do today?” Jim asked.

“Do?” Spock repeated with an eyebrow raised.

Kirk took his meaning and stroked a hand along his spine. “We have a whole day that we’re allowed to spend together. No one will miss us at the conference.”

“I find myself rather unmotivated to do anything that will require us to be in view of the public,” Spock said.

Kirk had to kiss him for that. Yielding lips, delicious mouth. “I do have a hotel room,” he said.

“That is...tempting,” Spock said. “However, it is quite a beautiful day outside.”

“Have you ever been to San Francisco?”

Spock shook his head, one eyebrow quirking up.

“Me neither,” Kirk said. He ran his fingers up that eyebrow that he had wanted to touch yesterday. “I guess we could explore?”

Spock leaned in to rub his nose against Jim's cheek. "I would welcome the opportunity to explore with you."

Somehow they managed to separate and head towards the door. Kirk left an arm around Spock’s waist. They got all the way to the door before Spock pressed him against it and kissed him again.

Kirk felt the pressure of Spock’s body and the urgency of his kisses heat his blood. He found that he was hungry for more in a way he hadn’t been before. His tongue ravished Spock’s mouth. He could feel his cock growing hard, and he felt an answering hardness against his leg. Their tongues sucked and lapped and their breath grew ragged...

Finally Spock pulled away and rested his forehead against Jim’s.

“I swear,” Jim said, breathing heavily, “we will get out of this storage room today.”

“I fear I have not left us in a fitting state to be seen outside,” Spock said.

Jim laughed. Slowly Spock disentangled himself from Jim, and Jim moved away to lean against the wall. “We’ll have to give it a minute,” he said.

Spock somehow seemed to recover much faster than Jim did—probably something to do with Vulcan bodily controls. Jim, on the other hand, had to look away and think about math problems for a minute or two.

Finally he looked back at Spock and smiled. “Sorry. Not a Vulcan,” he said.

“An excusable fault,” Spock said. His eyes looked amused. He took a hand and stroked it along Jim’s cheek.

“Careful,” Jim said. “Or I’ll have to start all over.”

“I acknowledge your point,” Spock said.

They opened the door cautiously and slipped back into the hallway. From there, they strolled down the stairs, along the main corridor of the building, and out the front door, as confidently as if it were exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

No one stopped them.


	4. Chapter 4

It wasn’t until they were a block and a half away from Starfleet Headquarters that Jim relaxed. This was far enough from the conference that there was no reason for anyone on the street to recognize them.

“Do you know where you are going?” Spock asked.

“Nope,” Jim said. “Not a clue.” They were navigating through thick streams of people on the sidewalk.

Spock raised an eyebrow. “Is that not a problem?”

“That’s what exploring’s all about.” Jim gave him a broad smile. “If we knew where we were going, it wouldn’t count.”

They continued down the street they were on. About halfway down the next block, Kirk reached over and took Spock’s hand in his.

Spock glanced at him with a look of surprised pleasure.

“Is this all right?” Kirk said. “We don’t have to if you’re not comfortable with it.”

“No. No, I…” Spock’s voice seemed to catch slightly. “I want to very much.”

Jim squeezed his hand, and they walked, hand-in-hand, down the crowded street. There seemed to be mostly stores around them, and Jim couldn’t help but think that they wouldn’t be very compelling to a Vulcan who probably didn’t place a lot of stock in material goods anyway. Then at the end of the next cross street, up a steep hill, he caught a glimpse of a facade of white stone, and he knew where they should go.

Spock looked over at him when they suddenly changed direction. “Where are we going?”

“I found a destination for us,” Kirk said.

He led Spock up the long flight of white steps and past a sign carved with an image of an early spaceship. He saw Spock look up at the sign and then meet his eye with a bright look. Jim grinned. “I thought you’d like it.”

They passed through the doors and into the Museum of Aeronautic and Space Travel.

Spock dropped his hand as soon as they entered the atrium. Jim understood: it was fine on the street, but not inside a place like this.

There was a woman selling tickets behind a glass-topped desk. Jim and Spock were both under eighteen, so they didn’t have to pay an admission fee. They were issued little pins to wear and ushered through an arch into the main exhibition hall.

Where Jim froze in wonder.

Rising towards the ceiling of the main hall, at least five stories high, was a rocket ship.

“It is the Jupiter 9,” Spock’s voice said quietly beside him as Jim stood and stared. “It is beautiful, is it not?”

Jim was awash in the power of the sight. The ship looked like it could take off and blast right through the building and up through the sky.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

They walked slowly around it, admiring the smooth expanse of shining metal. The name of the ship sounded familiar, but Jim couldn’t quite place it. “Did the Jupiter 9 ever go into space?” he asked.

“Once,” Spock said. “It was the first spacecraft to go past the orbit of Mars and return in a fully functional condition. It went to Jupiter and returned with three astronauts on board.”

The metal before him, then, had been in the cold depths of space. But then, so had the person standing next to him. “Why didn’t they send it up again if it was fully functional?” Jim asked.

“Because that year, the warp engine was invented,” Spock said. “Rockets became obsolete.”

The overhead lights reflected brightly in the side of the space ship. Jim wondered what the light of the sun had looked like against it. “So it came back ready to go out again, and then it ended up in here instead.”

Spock’s fingers brushed against the side of Kirk’s hand. He realized that Spock could tell the story had saddened him. It was stupid—to get upset about a story about an inanimate object. But he couldn’t help it: the ship looked so noble, like it belonged in space. He caught Spock’s fingers in his for a second, then let them go.

He cast his eyes over to Spock. “How do you know so much about this, anyway?”

An eyebrow rose. “Our school system believes in educating its students.”

Jim didn’t know whether to laugh or gape, so he did both. “Hey! I’ll have you know that our school system believes in going through history in order. At the moment, I can tell you anything you want about World War I or II.”

“If I discover any gaps in my knowledge on the subject, I will be sure to ask you,” Spock said.

Jim thought he deserved at least a noogie for that, but he decided attacking Spock in the main hall of the MAST would probably cause a scene. Plus, it would probably have resulted in the kind of public display of affection that he had a feeling Spock would not appreciate. So he settled for punching him lightly in the arm and then tugging on his sleeve. “Come on. Let’s go learn about the Apollo missions.”

They spent a couple of hours wandering through the various exhibition halls. Jim had learned about a lot of it before, of course—his high school might be going through history chronologically, but the history of space travel had come up quite a bit in earlier years—but he learned a lot he hadn’t known, and he found most of it pretty interesting.

Well, it was about space. All of it was interesting.

Spock seemed to enjoy himself as well. Whenever Jim looked over at him, he was deeply absorbed in one exhibit or another, usually with his head cocked to the side. By the time they reached the room describing the history of the internal combustion engine, Jim was feeling like he’d had enough of reading displays. He looked up to find Spock, to see if he was ready to go, and he saw him looking over a large model engine in the middle of the room. The look on his face—it was so intent, so concentrated, that Jim couldn’t take his eyes away. All of his being seemed to be focused on the object before him, like it had been with the drawing of the tree house the night before, as if he could stare at it hard enough to take its secrets inside himself. It made little bubbles of something—happiness? awe?—rise in Jim’s chest.

Suddenly those eyes looked up and met Jim’s. They held for a moment.

“I love how fascinated you get,” Jim said.

There was another moment of silence in which they simply looked at each other. Jim’s fingers itched to reach up and touch that face with its serious expression, with its focus...

“You have finished with this room?” Spock asked.

It took a moment for Jim to register Spock’s words. “More or less,” he said, a tiny grin quirking on his mouth. “I got...distracted.”

Spock’s eyes lightened. “I believe we have seen most of the museum.” His head tilted towards the door at the far end of the room. “But we have not yet been through there.”

He set out across the floor and Jim followed him, feeling like he would have followed him anywhere. On the other side of the door it was unexpectedly dark, and for a second Jim thought they had wound up somewhere they weren’t supposed to—but then he saw that there was a screen at one end with a movie playing. A narrator was saying something about the first missions to Mars.

“Would you like to watch?” Spock asked in a whisper. There was almost no one else in the room: just a few heads visible near the front, over the backs of the movie theater-type seats.

“Sure,” Jim whispered back.

They filed into a row about two-thirds of the way to the back of the small theater and sat down. As soon as they sat, Jim could feel Spock’s body like a magnetic force in the darkness. His hand went to Spock’s thigh, squeezing, and their legs groped together so that their ankles rubbed against each other. Jim’s hand went up to Spock’s face, and then they were kissing blindly in the dark, mouths desperate for each other. Jim felt heat and hunger deep in his stomach.

“Maybe we should…” he started to whisper, drawing back, but Spock seized his mouth again and cut off his speech. Jim’s hands went to Spock’s sides, feeling warm skin through the thin fabric of his shirt. Spock’s hand found the back of his neck and stroked through the short hair there.

The plastic armrest between the seats was torture. Jim wanted to climb over it and press his body full against Spock’s. He wanted to melt into him until they were one instead of two. He wanted…

Neither of them had any idea what was said for the rest of the movie. When the lights came on, they came apart and blinked at each other. Spock looked ruffled, his lips swollen, his hair mussed where Jim’s hands had run through it.

“I fear we did not gain as much knowledge from that movie as we might have,” he said.

“It was over way too soon, though,” Jim said.

There was a moment of silence in which Jim fought mightily against the urge to kiss Spock again in the brightness, and then they rose and filed out of the little theater with the other viewers. They went past the Jupiter 9 and out of the museum, onto the steps bathed in bright sunshine.

It must have been near noon. Jim’s stomach gave a grumble.

“Fascinating,” Spock said, his eyes on Jim’s middle. “I believe your stomach is trying to communicate with us.”

Jim laughed. “Yeah, it’s telling us it’s time to eat.”

“Do you have a restaurant preference?” Spock asked.

Jim thought about it for a minute. “Actually,” he said, “I have something better.”

He led them back a block to where he had seen a supermarket earlier. As soon as they passed through the automatic doors, Spock’s eyebrow went up. “Are you planning to cook us a meal?”

“Of course not,” Jim said cheerfully. And before Spock could ask anything else, he grabbed a basket and headed down the bread aisle.

He picked out bread, cheese, peanut butter, jelly, and apples, all under Spock’s watchful and somewhat dubious eye. When they got up to the checkout counter, Jim gave the cashier his credit number. Spock started to reach into his pocket, but Jim waved his hand away.

“This is a date,” he said. “Only one of us pays.”

Spock’s eyebrow only rose higher.

They went back out onto the sidewalk with their new acquisitions. “At what point in this date am I to be told of our destination?” Spock asked.

“It’s simple.” Jim held up the bags of food. “We,” he said, “are going to have a picnic.”

There was that eyebrow again. Jim just grinned and started walking. The sun was high, the afternoon was before them, and Spock was at his side. He could have skipped down the sidewalk.

He led the way to where he had seen a glimpse of green earlier. Sure enough, it turned out to be the edge of a park—a much, much larger park than he had suspect. Green grass, flower beds, and stately trees as far as the eye could see.

Jim started across the grass towards a promising spot of sunshine. He got about ten yards before he realized Spock wasn’t beside him. He turned around to see him standing at the gate and staring.

“What’s wrong?” Jim asked, walking back.

“Do you have many such concentrations of greenery on your planet?” Spock said. He sounded a bit shell-shocked.

Jim had to laugh. He had forgotten that Spock had grown up on a desert planet. “You knew about Jupiter 9, but this is a surprise?” he asked.

Spock’s expression quickly shifted into a more familiar one of affrontedness. “It is not a lack of knowledge,” he said. “I merely…had not properly anticipated the firsthand effect.”

Jim smiled at him. “Yeah, it’s pretty amazing,” he said. “Even we humans realize that sometimes.” He took Spock’s hand and led him across the grass.

He had picked out a spot near a cluster of trees where the grass was a mix of sun and shade. When he got there, he let go of Spock’s hand and sat down on the grass, expecting Spock to do the same. When that didn’t happen, he looked up.

Spock was just standing there, looking down at him in bemusement. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sitting on the grass,” Jim said. “Try it. You’ll like it.”

Spock sat down facing him. He looked so tentative about it that Jim laughed.

“See? It’s not bad,” Jim said.

“Is this part of your proposed picnic?” Spock asked, sounding as if Jim were making him sit in a mud pit infested with hungry crocodiles.

“An essential part,” Jim said. “The two things you have to do at any picnic are sit on the ground and eat food.”

“I am not sure I approve of this concept,” Spock said, though the light in his eyes belied his words.

“Well, you’ve only experienced part of it,” Jim said. “Next, we eat.”

He opened the grocery bags and spread out the food he had brought and silently congratulated himself for having remembered the plastic utensils. He had a feeling Spock would not be on board with the “stick your finger in the peanut butter jar” method of eating.

Spock surveyed the food in front of him. “I am afraid I am unfamiliar with many of these foodstuffs.”

“What?” Jim said. “You’ve never had peanut butter and jelly?”

“Unfortunately,” Spock said, “no.”

“Tragedy,” Jim said with a grin. “We’ll fix that.”

He felt Spock’s eyes on him, the sun warm on his skin, as he put together a sandwich. When it was done, he lifted it up on the palm of his hand for Spock to take a bite. Spock held eye contact with Jim as he took a bite, his lips brushing against Jim’s fingers.

Jim watched Spock chew. “It is not bad,” he pronounced after finally swallowing.

“Then you’d better have more,” Jim said, “because otherwise I’m going to lean over and kiss you on the mouth.”

There were a few seconds of silence, in which Kirk saw in Spock’s eyes that he wanted it at least as much as Jim did, and then Spock picked up the sandwich and took another bite.

Kirk made himself a sandwich, and then they both had bread and cheese and apple slices and lemonade. Spock seemed to enjoy everything, but he declared the peanut butter and jelly his favorite.

“It is both sweet and nutritive. I do not understand why it is unknown on my planet,” he said as he finished his second sandwich.

“Probably the lack of peanuts,” Jim suggested.

When they had eaten as much as they wanted, they packed up the rest of the food and put it in one of the grocery bags. Spock looked at Jim.

“What happens next on a picnic?” he asked.

“Next, we lie down on the grass and enjoy the sunshine,” Jim said.

Spock did not seem as disturbed by this as he had by the prospect of sitting on the grass. They lay down with about a foot of space between them. The thick grass tickled Jim’s neck.

Jim reached across the space and clasped his hand in Spock’s. His thumb rubbed a pattern on Spock’s skin. It was nice—although what he really wanted was to do was roll over and cover Spock’s body with his own. For the moment, in public, he’d have to be content with a single hand.

“Did you ever watch clouds when you were a kid?” he asked.

“What would I be watching them for?” Spock asked in reply.

Jim laughed. “Shapes. Creatures. See that one?” He pointed skyward with his free hand. “It looks like a turtle with a castle on its back.”

Spock was silent for long moments. Jim was afraid this kind of imagining game might be pushing the limits of Vulcan sensibilities, but finally Spock raised his own finger to point at the sky. “That one resembles a flying lizard.”

“Oh, you’re right. Probably about to try to steal the castle from the turtle.”

Spock moved his hand. “And that one resembles a satellite orbiting a planet at a 45-degree angle of occlusion.”

Jim laughed and squeezed Spock’s hand. “I never found that one as a kid.”

The sun was just the right temperature on his skin. He closed his eyes against it and felt Spock’s hand in his. It was...a miracle. The whole past twenty-four hours.

Suddenly Spock’s hand slipped out of his. Jim opened his eyes to see Spock lying on his side, his head propped up on his elbow so that he could look down at Jim. “It occurs to me that I am missing much essential data on you, Jim.”

Jim smiled at the sight of him looking down from above. “Is that your way of saying, ‘Tell me about yourself’?” he asked.

Spock reached out a hand and touched Jim very lightly on the cheek with one fingertip. “There is indeed much I would like to know.”

Jim felt like his breath was caught in his chest at that touch. There were only about six inches between their bodies, and it would be so easily bridged. Would it be so very bad if they made out in the middle of a park? He took a shuddering breath. “Well,” he said, trying to summon a thought or two, “I’m fifteen years old; I’m from Iowa; I have an older brother who’s at college right now; I go to Riverside High School; I’m going to get into Starfleet Academy if it kills me…”

Spock’s eyes smiled down at him.

“Is that enough?” Jim asked.

“I am not certain I will never have enough,” Spock said softly

The tone of Spock’s voice sent a quiver through Jim’s body. It was impossible not to touch him in some way. Jim reached his hand out and rubbed his thumb along the side of Spock’s cheek. Spock closed his eyes.

“My mother is a Xenoculture professor at the University of Iowa,” Jim said. “My father…died in the line of duty. Five years ago.”

Spock’s eyes opened at that. Jim could see sudden sorrow, the desire to comfort, in those deep brown eyes. “Jim. I grieve with thee.”

“Thanks,” Jim said quietly. But he didn’t want to let that become what this moment was about. “Now tell me about yourself.”

Spock took Jim’s hand with the one that wasn’t propping up his head. “You already know much of what there is to know,” he said.

“How old are you?” Jim asked.

“I am seventeen years and fifty-four days old in Earth reckoning,” Spock answered.

Jim grinned. “Cradle robber.”

Spock raised a questioning eyebrow.

“It’s a term for someone who dates someone younger than they are,” Jim explained.

“I do not believe the difference in our ages is substantial enough to be a deterrent,” Spock said.

“It better not be,” Jim said. God, Spock’s lips were so close. If only they were alone...

“I have just begun my final year of secondary education,” Spock said. “As you know, my mother is human. She and my father met when he was stationed as Ambassador to Earth.”

Jim hadn’t realized his father was an ambassador. That explained Spock’s presence at this conference. “Any siblings?”

“No,” Spock said. He threaded his fingers through Jim’s. “I…have always been curious about the experience of those with siblings, though.” He looked at Jim shyly. “Will you tell me what it is like?”

“Huh. I guess I’ve never really thought about it,” Jim said. “It’s...well, it’s so normal for me, it’s hard to really describe. It can be a huge pain sometimes. But I guess it’s pretty great in some ways, too. It was nice to have someone to play with when we were little.” He brought their joined hands to his chest. There was something in Spock’s eyes that he couldn’t quite read. “Are siblings uncommon on Vulcan?”

“No,” Spock said. “It is just that I...I believe I would have enjoyed the companionship you describe.”

Loneliness. That’s what Jim had read in Spock’s eyes. “Oh, Spock.” He put his hand on Spock’s cheek again. “Don’t worry, my brother isn’t that great.”

Amusement blossomed in Spock’s eyes. “I find that difficult to believe,” he said, looking at Jim through his eyelashes. “He is very closely related to you.”

The fact that Jim didn't kiss him then demonstrated an almost superhuman level of willpower.


	5. Chapter 5

For it to be a true day of exploration, they had to wander a bit, and so they did that after lunch. They went fairly aimlessly through the streets of the city, exclaiming at the architecture (well, the exclamations were just from Jim) and occasionally going into one of the more interesting-looking stores. Spock, it seemed, had a fondness for Earth antiques—or at least had a propensity for declaring them “fascinating.”

By the end of the afternoon, they found themselves down by the ocean. They walked along a touristy pier for a while, looking at all the strange things that were sold and bought and the strange people buying and selling. Jim felt as though a deep contentment had settled down so deep within him that it must be setting him aglow. As if he should be able to brush his hand against his skin and feel it.

Spock did not seem to be able to get over the sight of the water. “There is such a great quantity of it,” he kept saying, with such a light in his eyes that Jim had to laugh.

“That’s pretty much the idea,” he said.

They ended up sitting on the low wall along the side of the pier and looking out at the water. The sun was starting to sink in the sky and throw long shadows behind them. Jim felt a chill creep into his happiness.

“Spock,” he said, “what happens after tomorrow?”

He could feel Spock going still next to him. He turned to look at him and his gaze returned. “I do not know, Jim.”

He felt a trickle of panic. “I mean, I don’t know what you would…what you would, you know, want, I mean, if we could…”

Spock silenced him by touching his hand to Jim’s thigh. It was a very intimate gesture for a Vulcan in such a public place, and Jim felt his panic subside at the warmth of it.

“I do not know what to wish for us under the current circumstances,” Spock said softly. “But you must know that if the circumstances made it possible, I would not wish to be parted from you.”

Jim wanted so badly to lean in and kiss him on the lips. But there were tourists strolling up and down the pier, and he knew Spock wouldn’t be comfortable with that. Instead he put his hand over Spock’s where it still rested on his leg and squeezed.

Spock turned his hand over and took Jim’s in his own. “What is that you wish?” he asked, and Jim wondered if he were imagining the uncertainty in his voice.

“I...well, I guess it’s pretty obvious,” Jim said. He gave a little smile. “I still don’t understand how any of this happened, but I would hang onto you if I could.”

Spock gripped his hand in silence.

“So, let’s think this through,” Jim said. “You’ll be at the Vulcan Science Academy for, what, the next four-plus years?”

“It is a four-year program,” Spock said. “Meanwhile, you will be remaining on Earth until the end of your Starfleet education.”

“Seven years from now,” Jim said. “Any chance you’ll come to Earth again with your father?”

“It is unlikely,” Spock said. “He is not in the habit of taking me on his voyages of state. This trip is a notable exception.”

“So, almost five years before either of us is free to leave our own planets,” Jim said. He looked out at the waves. “Five years is a pretty long time.”

Spock was silent. Jim felt a wave of sadness rise from within him. It was suddenly intensely painful to be sitting with Spock somewhere where he couldn’t touch him, kiss him. He looked at Spock and saw the same pain mirrored in his eyes. 

They would be spending enough time over the next few years in places where they couldn’t kiss each other. He leapt up and used his grip on Spock’s hand to pull him up after him. “Come on,” he said, smiling again, even if the smile was a little forced. “Let’s go back to Headquarters.”

They walked back through the streets of San Francisco, hand in hand. Jim watched the late afternoon light play on Spock’s hair, his skin. When they were close enough to Starfleet Headquarters that they could catch glimpses of the buildings, they let their hands drop.

“Do you want to go to dinner?” Spock asked.

Jim did not. But: “My mom will notice if I’m not there.”

“As will my father notice me,” Spock said. There was a pause. “Afterwards…” he said hesitantly.

“I’m in room 244,” Jim said. “But I’m not planning on leaving that dining room without you.”

They parted right before the doorway to the officers’ mess where they’d had breakfast—tonight’s dinner was not a formal affair. Jim let Spock enter first, and then he went in and searched through the tables until he found his mother.

She rose and greeted him with a kiss. “How was your day?”

“Educational,” he said, with a slightly forced grin.

They talked about the conference throughout dinner. Jim had to make up some things about the future of warp-speed travel and the theory of cultural universals to make it seem like he’d actually attended some seminars. Fortunately, he had learned a few things at the MAST that he could easily pretend he’d gathered in some seminar or other. It was a struggle for him to pay attention, though: his mind kept drifting to the way Spock’s face had looked in the sunlight, to the feel of Spock’s body inches from his in the grass.

He made a show of yawning throughout dessert. When it was time for them to go to the evening cocktails and roundtables event, he said, “You know what? I’m actually really tired. I think I might head back to my room.”

She looked at him with concern. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Oh yeah, I just couldn’t sleep last night,” Jim said.

“All right,” she said—probably with some concern, but he couldn’t make himself pay enough attention to notice. His eyes were already seeking out Spock’s.

Their eyes met just as Jim was rising from the table. He saw Spock lean over and say something to the stern-faced Vulcan next to him, who must have been his father. Not a face Jim would want to live with every day. No wonder Spock had left so quickly the night before.

Jim walked to the door of the mess with the pleasantly edgy feeling of eyes on his back. Outside the door, he stepped to the side and waited.

It was a couple of minutes before Spock emerged. Jim felt a smile appear on his face at the sight of him.

“Hey,” he said. “Did you get out of the evening event?”

Spock nodded. There was a warmth in his eyes that kindled something in Jim’s stomach.

He would have taken Spock’s arm to lead him away, but that would have been less than subtle. He settled for holding him with his eyes. “Let’s go,” he said.

They walked in silence, saving communication for what was to come. Jim could feel Spock’s body next to him as they walked. It had been too long, far too long since he had been able to run his hands over it.

Spock waited by his side as he slipped the keycard into the hotel door. The light above the doorknob turned green, and the door clicked open.

Jim stepped inside, and Spock followed. Once the door was shut, he turned and looked at Spock for a moment. Their eyes connected in a moment of expectation. Then they moved into each other’s arms, and their mouths found each other immediately.

Their kisses were full and hungry, making up for all the times that afternoon they had wanted to touch and had not. Jim held Spock’s warm body close against his own. This was what he had been waiting for all day. This completeness. Tongues stroked, and slid, and sucked, and everything in Jim’s head was singing...

They were still just a foot or two from the door. Jim was dimly aware that it would make more sense to go farther into the room. He managed to walk them towards the bed without arms or mouths separating, and there they had to stop again, because Jim had slipped his hands up under the back of Spock’s shirt and that was enough to occlude further thought. His hands slid up the untouched skin of Spock’s back to his shoulder blades.

Their kisses gained further depth. Spock was making little noises in the back of his throat that seemed to go straight to Jim’s groin. He walked them the two steps to the bed, and they fell onto it.

They landed with Jim underneath, and Jim rolled them over to do what he’d wanted to do so badly in the park: cover Spock’s body with his own. His hands went up to Spock’s head and stroked through dark hair. Spock’s hands were under his shirt now. Jim felt them inflaming the skin of his back.

Their legs tangled inextricably, feet rubbing together, shoes long gone. Jim felt as if it were impossible to kiss Spock long or deep enough. Little moans were coming from him, and his breath was ragged. The taste of Spock was all over him, clinging to his skin. There was a delicious throbbing in his groin, and he was so very, very hard...

Spock was hard as well. Jim could feel his cock pressed into his leg. There was a heightened urgency to both their kisses now. He gave one tiny thrust into Spock’s leg and felt the sensation ripple through him. Then he pulled his head back so he could see Spock’s face.

“Want to?” he whispered.

The hungry look in Spock’s eyes vanished, replaced by one of terror. “Jim, I cannot—I am—”

There was panic in his voice. Jim instantly felt his own heartbeat settle. “Sh, sh, it’s okay,” he whispered. He rolled to the side, so that they were lying on their sides and facing each other, and pulled Spock close. “We don’t have to.”

For long minutes he just held Spock as their breathing evened out. Then Jim pulled his head back to look at Spock’s face. Spock met his gaze, rumpled, vulnerable. Jim leaned in and kissed him on the mouth: a sweet, gentle kiss of reassurance.

Spock returned the kiss. It deepened slowly, and Jim felt his arousal build again—but he could control it. He could fight the heat that flickered along their bodies and sank into his blood.

At one point they separated for a moment to breathe, arms still around each other. “I don’t want to lose this,” Jim whispered.

Spock’s fingertips brushed against his face. “If you permit it,” Spock whispered, “I would meld us.”

Jim wasn’t sure what he meant—he had heard the word, but all he knew was that it was tied up in Vulcan telepathy. But he wouldn’t refuse anything Spock wanted to do with him. “Yes,” he whispered.

Spock’s fingers settled more firmly on his skin. Jim felt a momentary disorientation—and then he was not alone in his own mind. There was almost a physical sensation of another, as if other thoughts were sliding along his.

“What...?” he asked, and then realized he hadn’t spoken aloud. He had spoken the thought within his mind, and it had been heard.

Our minds are joined, said another mental voice, one he recognized immediately as Spock’s. We may now perceive each other’s thoughts.

The world in his mind’s eye began to settle. He looked down and saw that he had a body, here in the world of the meld. His skin was slightly brighter than normal. He was suspended in a world of muted colors with no sky or ground.

Spock was walking towards him. At least, it looked just like Spock walking towards him, but when he got closer, Jim realized he could feel his approach as well as see it. What he felt...what he felt enveloping him was everything he had seen in Spock’s eyes in their very first look at each other. A bright, clear intelligence mixed with deep and hidden feelings; a natural compassion; a sense of duty, and honor, and calling; and under and over it all, rolling towards him, waves of something indefinable that was only Spock.

He felt a wave of affection rise within him. He took mind-Spock’s hands and felt his affection returned: Spock’s feelings for him washed through their mind-link, stroking his skin with tendrils of warmth.

Jim stood amazed. He looked into mind-Spock’s eyes, but what was overwhelming him was what was all around him. He could feel Spock on every inch of his skin.

“Is it always like this?” he whispered.

One of Spock’s hands rose in the meld and stroked along his face. “I do not know,” he said. “I have never engaged in this type of meld with anyone but you.”

Jim felt as if he were full to bursting. His joy was so great that he had to laugh. His laughter made the world of colors pulse and dance. “Where do the colors come from?” he asked.

“They come because we have not substituted anything else,” Spock said. “Would you like to change it?”

Jim was not conscious of doing anything, but the next moment they seemed to be standing outside his own house in Iowa. They were on the sloping lawn under the living room window, near the row of hydrangea bushes his mother had put in last spring. Jim whirled around in surprise. “Where did this come from?”

“This is an image supplied by your mind,” Spock said. His eyebrow quirked in amusement.

It looked so real. Jim could not get over it. He bent down and touched the blades of grass to see if they were solid. “But why?”

“The reason must have come from your mind,” Spock said. “Is there something here you wanted to show me?”

Show him...yes, Jim could do that. He took one of Spock’s hands. “This way,” he said.

They walked across the grass as easily as Jim might have done it at home. This ability to create a shared mind-space astonished him. They could go…well, anywhere in the galaxy that they could imagine.

Jim led the way to a large tree in the back yard. “Look,” he said, coming to a stop in front of it. “That’s where the tree house will be.”

“I see,” Spock said.

He let go of Jim’s hand and walked in a slow circle around the tree. Jim watched him cast an appraising eye at the branches, the trunk. Finally he came back and looked in Jim’s eyes. “Your drawing was indeed not to scale.”

Jim smiled into his eyes. “What happens if I kiss you here?”

“I too confess to some curiosity on that front,” Spock said, and moved a step closer.

When their lips joined, it felt—it felt more real than it did in the outside world. As if Jim were kissing not just Spock’s mouth but his essence. He felt as if the kisses reached far beyond his mouth, as if every touch of Spock’s went deep within him to nerves that had never before been touched. He felt Spock against him, within him, around him….

The sensation set him alight. He felt his cock growing hard again. It was a struggle to keep kissing Spock and keep his arousal in check, but he did not stop. He pulled Spock’s tongue against his own and let the feeling of Spock run all over his body.

At some point during the kiss there was a feeling of dissolution and a change in the light, and Kirk opened his eyes to realize he was back in his own body on the bed. He was panting from the kiss, and his cock was hard in the real world as well. He nuzzled his nose against Spock’s cheek. “That was amazing,” he said.

“As are you,” Spock whispered in his ear.

After that there was a long, slow kiss that Jim got lost in. Afterward he ran his fingertips along Spock’s spine and thought about all that he held.

“Do you have to go back to your room tonight?” he whispered into Spock’s ear.

Spock kissed the skin beneath his ear. “I do not believe I will be missed.”

Jim pulled him closer. “Good.” 

It took a few more minutes, but finally they managed to separate long enough to get up from the bed and get ready to sleep. Jim changed into his pajamas while Spock was in the bathroom. Spock didn’t have pajamas with him, of course, but he took off his shoes and socks and shirt, leaving his undershirt and his trousers. In Jim’s opinion, this was far more clothing than was necessary, but he wasn’t about to object. He took his turn in the bathroom and took a quick shower and brushed his teeth.

Spock was waiting to kiss him when he emerged from the bathroom. “You taste of mint,” he said when they separated, one eyebrow arched in surprise.

“Mm.” Jim put his arms around Spock’s waist. “What do I normally taste of?”

Spock thought for a moment. “You taste of air that has been warmed with sunshine,” he said.

Jim put his mouth back on Spock’s and slipped his tongue through his lips. When he felt his arousal beginning to mount too high, he stepped back and took Spock’s hand and led him to the bed.

Spock had turned back the blanket and top sheet while Jim had been in the shower. They climbed in, and Jim pulled the blanket and sheet back up over them. He realized suddenly that he had never done this: slept in a bed with someone other than platonically. He had never had a whole night with someone.

Spock lay on his side, facing him. Jim looked into his face across a bare eight inches of pillow. “In what position would you like to sleep?” Spock asked.

Spock’s body next to him, all night. It was almost too much. Jim slipped his hand under the thin undershirt and ran it over Spock’s side. “I don’t know if I can sleep at all, with you here,” he said.

Spock raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps this is a disadvantageous arrangement for your health,” he said. 

“Oh, no, sleep is highly overrated,” Jim said. “I hear that what you really need for good health is kisses from a very attractive Vulcan.”

“Hm. Perhaps I should go find one of those,” Spock said.

Jim hooked his leg around Spock’s. “Nah, don’t bother, there probably aren’t any around here.”

“They are indeed scarce,” Spock whispered. His mouth was about half an inch from Jim’s now. Jim’s hand traveled up under the front of his undershirt and came to rest on a nipple, which he circled lightly with one finger. He saw Spock’s eyes flutter shut. The sound of their breathing filled the room.

Part of Jim wanted to broach the subject of the extremely hard cocks which currently were about half an inch apart from each other, but he still had enough brain power to know better than that. Not ready meant not ready, whatever Spock’s reasons. Any more of this and he really wouldn’t be able to sleep.

He moved his hand around to Spock’s back so they could catch their breath. Spock slid down a few inches and rested his head on Jim’s shoulder, so that Jim was on his back and Spock was resting part of the way on top of him. They each had an arm around the other, and their legs were entangled. That was good enough for Jim. He brushed a hand through his Vulcan’s hair.

“Ready to sleep now?” he asked.

“I believe so,” Spock said.

“Good night, Spock.”

“Good night, Jim,” Spock said into the fabric of his shirt.

Holding each other close, they drifted off to sleep.


	6. Chapter 6

Jim woke up in the light of morning to discover that they hadn’t separated an inch during the night. Spock’s head still rested on his chest, and their legs were entwined.

He leaned his head down and rested his cheek against that head of dark hair. How could the time have passed so quickly? It had felt like no time at all, and yet he felt he had known Spock forever.

Spock stirred against his shoulder. Jim tightened his arms around him. “Good morning,” he whispered.

Spock brought his head up to meet Jim’s, and Jim saw the brief sleepiness that clung to the Vulcan features. Their lips met in a kiss. There was so much warmth all through Jim’s body, and yet, and yet...

“What time are you leaving?” Jim whispered against Spock’s lips.

“Our shuttle departs at 10:30,” Spock said.

Jim was glad their faces were close enough together that Spock couldn’t see his reaction. He turned his face into Spock’s hair, up against that smooth pointed ear, and held him as tightly as he could.

How had this all happened? So fast…and now he felt like losing Spock would mean losing something essential to him, like his stomach, or his lungs. Something had happened when their eyes had met that night at the banquet. A chemical reaction had been triggered, and both had been transformed.

Finally, reluctantly, Jim lifted his head again. “I guess we should get going,” he said. “My mom’s expecting me at breakfast, and your dad will be missing y—”

Spock cut him off by seizing his mouth in a kiss—not a sweet good-morning kiss this time, but a fierce, hot, possessive kiss, in which Jim could feel the same force of need that he had just been contending with. This time it was Spock who rolled on top of Jim, so that Jim’s whole body was covered in the warmth and pressure of him. Jim let himself be swept up in the heat of it: in the deepening, hungry kisses, in Spock’s hands stroking through his hair, in the pressure of Spock’s body against him. Against the hardness that was growing between his legs.

He felt his heart rate mount and his breathing turn to gasps. His hands seized as much of Spock as they could reach. Spock was all around him; he was drowning in him. His tongue plunged into Jim’s mouth and made all the solid lines in the world dissolve. Jim was floating in intensity…growing, pulsing, cresting towards Spock…

Shortly before Jim reached the point of no return, Spock pulled away, gasping. He let his head drop on the pillow just below Jim’s. Jim ran trembling fingers through Spock’s hair while their breathing calmed and the throbbing in Jim’s cock quieted down to an ache.

The world shifted back into focus. Just one focus, really: that head of dark hair next to him, with the face that was pressed into his shoulder and the tip of a green-tinged ear that was just visible.

Jim felt the words building in his chest. It would be a mistake to say them—a mistake to go so far when they would have to separate in a few hours and they didn’t know when they would see each other again. He knew that. But the words were there and he had to say them.

“I love you,” he whispered.

He felt Spock go still in a different way than he had been before. For a long second there was silence in the room. Jim’s fingers stopped moving on Spock’s hair. Spock’s face was hidden in his shoulder, and now he desparately needed to see it, because what if...

Spock lifted his head so their eyes met. His eyes held none of the terror or scorn or pity that Jim had feared. They were shining.

They were Jim’s.

A great warmth of possession building in his chest. “You don’t have to say it,” Jim whispered. “I just needed you to know.”

Spock moved forward and touched his open lips to Jim’s, in a way that sent a tingle and then a wave of swift heat and quickening of blood down Jim’s body. “Jim,” he whispered into the kiss. “Jim, I know.”

Amazing how this one kiss could make him light up so instantaneously, bring him suddenly, desperately to the point where he wanted to press Spock to the bed and fuck him, fuck him as he’d never fucked anyone before, because he never had fucked anyone before, and he hadn’t realized how fully he wanted to until this very moment. His cock driving into Spock until they were both lost with need… But he breathed deeply and closed his eyes and let the kiss fill him.

They were nowhere near done with the kiss when there was a knock on the door.

They both froze. Jim’s hand rested on the soft skin at the base of Spock’s back, unmoving. Their faces separated just enough that he could see the very slight widening of Spock’s eyes.

“Jim?” his mother’s voice called. “Coming to breakfast?”

“Be there in a minute, Mom,” he called back, his eyes still on the sudden Vulcan mask that was Spock’s face. “You go ahead.”

For a minute they lay in silence as her footsteps went away. Then Jim saw and felt the infinitesimal change in muscle quality that was Spock relaxing. He pulled Spock closer and kissed his mouth again. “You didn’t think I was going to let her in, did you?”

“I am gratified that you did not,” Spock said.

They were kissing again, slowly. It was a difficult impulse to resist, when they were close like this, but now Jim felt the pressure of his mother’s voice in the back of his mind. He sighed. “I guess we should get up.”

Spock licked his lower lip. “I believe you are correct.”

If it had been up to Jim, they probably never would have gotten up; but Vulcans were nothing if not disciplined. And once Spock was out of the bed, it was a much less attractive place to be.

Jim packed in a rush, throwing his things into his suitcase while Spock got dressed. When he was done, Spock was waiting by the door, clean and pressed and still his. Still. Jim took his suitcase in one hand and went and took Spock’s hand with his other.

“And now we should go,” he said, though he didn’t move.

Spock met his eyes.

They managed to walk to the door, hand in hand, and then they had to stop and fold into each other again. For several minutes there was nothing but them. Jim rested his face on Spock’s shoulder and breathed in the smell of him. He remembered that first moment, less than forty-eight hours ago, when he had put his head here and they had just begun to realize what it was that they felt for each other.

“I’m glad you learned to dance,” he whispered into Spock’s shoulder.

Spock tightened his arms around Jim’s back. “As am I,” he said. His lips traveled up the length of Jim’s neck and buried themselves in his hair.

Jim could have stood like that all day: just holding Spock in his arms. Never in his life would he hold anything, anyone, better than this. But finally the sense of time passing made them pull reluctantly away from each other.

Spock’s eyes were slightly softer than usual. Jim suspected his own were shining with unshed tears. He smiled a tiny smile. “We could just _not_ go,” he said. “Let’s run away. Capture a spaceship and explore the galaxy.”

Spock put a hand on Jim’s cheek and caressed it slowly. “They would never take you into Starfleet after that.”

Lines being drawn with warm fingers on his skin. “We’ll see each other before you go.”

“I will make sure of it,” Spock said.

Once they were in the hallway, they didn’t hold hands. They did in the elevator, though—security cameras be damned. Hotel security wasn’t likely to go tell his mother.

Breakfast wasn’t casual like the day before. It was closing speeches, and formality, and seats in the grand ballroom again. The same tables as the first night.

Jim and Spock walked into the ballroom and took the seats they’d sat in back before they knew each other. Still on the same planet, in the same city, still in the same room—for a few hours more—yet they couldn’t sit together. But they could look. While they ate, Jim could not stop himself from looking across the room at Spock, and more often than not Spock was looking back. Better than Friday night—and yet worse, because now Jim knew what he was about to lose. He had no appetite for his scrambled eggs.

The speeches felt too short today. When they were over, people sat and chatted while waiters circled with coffee. Jim rested his fingers on the handle of a ceramic coffee mug while he darted his eyes over and over again to Spock’s table, relaxing each time he saw the party of Vulcans still there. And then he looked over and saw Spock’s father standing up.

Spock caught Jim’s eye and then rose as well. Jim felt a freezing sensation in his gut.

He let go of the coffee mug. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said to his mother, and got up and hurried out of the ballroom in the same direction as the Vulcan party.

He burst through the doors. Spock was waiting for him, leaning against the wall. Jim didn’t know what he’d done to get free of his father, but the older Vulcan was somehow, miraculously, nowhere in sight. Their eyes held for a second. Then Spock turned and led him silently down the hall and through an unmarked door.

Jim blinked for a moment in the bright fluorescent light of a closet. Then he was seized and kissed fiercely.

Oh, that embrace. He sank into it. For one blazing minute he had everything, the whole world, held there in his arms. All his. The best things he’d ever known...a person he had never dreamed to meet...

There was such heat in these last kisses. Tongues plunging, stroking, memorizing. He felt as if Spock were being seared into him, marking him even more deeply than he had before. Melting into his bones. Lines of connection burrowing in, forged in iron, so strong that they wouldn’t be able to separate. Bound together by their very flesh.

Spock took his mouth away from Jim’s and rested their cheeks together. “I will miss you,” he whispered into Jim’s ear.

And then he was gone.


	7. Chapter 7

Spock was gone.

The silence in the closet was deafening. Jim could still feel the puff of warmth where Spock had whispered in his ear. He did not move.

He did not move.

He did not…

A screaming voice rose from his chest and filled his head, not escaping into the air, just echoing around his brain. A numbness had fallen over his body. A chill in the air, cold everywhere. He could feel that scream along his skin.

He fell back against the metal shelves behind him. There was a blunt pain as their edges dug into his back, but he didn’t care. He was staring at...nothing. He stared at nothing.

Have to get out of here. Move away from the pain, the screaming, the tearing in the universe and the bright light and the glaring walls and the...

The doorknob turned under his hand. The hallway materialized around him and moved slowly past him. The carpet under his feet, the people walking past—all separated from him by a layer of Novocaine.

The hallways turned into the doors to the ballroom. As soon as they were open, the noise hit him like a punch to a numbed jaw. He blinked and raised a hand as if to ward it off. His first instinct was to back off, to go find (find what? Spock was gone) a quiet place, but there was no quiet on this side of the day. To get to the quiet, he had to get through the next few hours until he could (could what? _Spock was gone_ ) go home. To an empty room.

People kept brushing up against him as he walked to his table. He felt their contact with his skin like strikes against a bruise.

The person in front of him now was his mother. This was his table; he had reached it. She was saying something.

“What?” he said when the words had stopped. At least, he thought they were words.

“I said, are you okay?” she asked again.

This time he heard them as words, though it took a few seconds before they made sense in his head. He let the wave of pain pass before answering. “I don’t feel very good,” he said.

Her hand came out to touch his forehead. He almost flinched away at the approach of touch, but he held himself still. “You don’t seem warm.”

Shrug. Shoulders up, down—he could manage that.

A frown on her face. “We should go home anyway. I have classes to prepare for. Are you done with breakfast?”

Jim nodded and followed her out of the ballroom, a cork trailing on a string across a vast and silent sea that might rise above his head at any moment.

***

The dazed feeling and the numbness in his chest lasted until he stood on the public transporter platform. He was standing in front of the technician, watching her finger move towards the button, when suddenly the numbness exploded into panic. No, he couldn’t leave—not without Spock—

_Spock is already gone,_ his mind whispered. _His shuttle left fifteen minutes ago._

But his arms and legs did not understand that, and they quivered as he gritted his teeth and held himself still so the transporter beam could take him. His stomach did not understand either, and he had to stand still for an extra moment after rematerialization while he fought down the urge to retch. His stomach twisted and tried to rebel, and he had to stand with fists clenched fiercely until the red faded from before his eyes.

He was back in Iowa.

In the aircar on the way home, he leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the window. The panic was gone. _He_ was out of reach now. A strong thread of wanting wove its way up through the emptiness that was his insides. He wanted—he wanted—

_There is nothing left to want. Spock is gone._

From ’car to bedroom. Bedroom door shutting behind him. Closing his eyes; no other sounds in the world. His mother shut out behind thick wood and a doorknob.

Stumble over to the bed. Lie down, curl up on side, arms holding knees to chest. Push against the pain. Keep it out. Keep out the tendrils of pain that snuck in around his knees and ate away at him like acid, ate and ate and ate and...

Jim’s face twisted into an unrecognizable expression. The pain was vivid in the air around him now, crowding in on him, a vibrant energy of agony. Just two words echoing through the teeth-gritting agony of it, like a monotonous dirge: seven years. Seven years. Seven years. Seven…

_Seven years is almost half my life._

Seven years seven years seven

_I won’t be able to last that long. I’ll have to…I won’t…_

Sevenyearssevenyearssevenyearssevenyearsseven…

Jim turned his head and bit down on the bedspread to keep back the howl that was rising in his chest, and the pain took him under.

***

The worst thing about the pain, he found out the next day, was that it never let up.

There was no respite from it: it followed him from home on the walk to school, over the threshold of the school building, down the hallway to his first class. It was there in his fingertips as he pressed the ident-lock on his locker. It was in the people whose faces morphed to Spock’s for just a second before fading back to their own.

Letters didn’t seem to make any sense to him. He stared at a page of his history book for twenty minutes during his first class, and when the teacher asked a question, all he could do was raise his head and look at her. She said a few other things that might have been questions before sending him to the nurse’s office.

The nurse’s office was nice. Jim got to lie on a clean white cot and curl up on his side so that the pain in his chest was less. He got to write the word “Spock” with his fingertip on the white sheet below him. But the pain came and found him there, too. By midday all he wanted to do was run out of the school screaming, or climb up the walls with the lockers on them—anything to climb out of the pain that lived in his own skin.

_Oh, Spock,_ he thought. _Spock, I need you. It turns out I can’t get by without you._

His friends noticed. Jim wasn’t sure how much they noticed—that would have required his paying attention—but he was pretty sure some of the looks and comments he was getting were strange. He didn’t care, though. The pain didn’t let him care.

Home at three. A dazed walk to his house, then up the stairs to his room, collapse on the bed.

How much would it cost to take a shuttle to Vulcan? Jim was underage, but he could probably forge the papers. He could get on a shuttle and be in Vulcan in a week. Then he could live in Spock’s arms again, instead of living in this, this pain...

His computer dinged.

Jim sat up. That wasn’t the normal ding of an incoming message—he had disabled that. That was the ding of a message that hadn’t come over Earth’s networks. A subspace message. Maybe junk mail; spammers sometimes used non-Earth routing addresses. Or maybe...

He went to his desk chair and clicked on the little pulsing icon. One message, from a routing address he didn’t know. He double-clicked on it.

_Dear Jim,_ it said at the top.

A bolt of adrenaline shot through him. He jumped down to the bottom of the message, and there were those five letters he wanted to see more than anything in the world.

_Spock._

He felt his face break into a blinding smile at the same time that a twist of grief cut into his gut. The mix of ebullience and longing were so strong that he had to sit still for a moment without reading until some of the intensity lessened. Spock had written him a message. Spock…

His hand was shaking on the computer mouse. He fumbled the scroll button back to the top and started from the beginning.

_Dear Jim,_ the message read. _I write you from my cabin aboard the _Sarax,_ where I find myself experiencing feelings of desolation greater than any that ought to be suffered by a Vulcan. And I must beg your forgiveness—for while I would do almost anything to save you from pain, I cannot avoid the illogical hope that you feel the same grief that I do. It seems that in this, my desires for you and my _desire_ for you are inextricably connected._

_In your presence, I have known joy greater than any I could ever have hoped for. It may be that this present grief would pass more quickly should we cease to remember that joy; however, after much thought, I find that I am unwilling to sever our connection. I do not flatter myself that you will want to continue our correspondence. However, if you wish it, I am your willing scribe._

_I will end the letter here, for I find myself with the illogical urge to spend the next four to six hours pouring words on paper simply to continue this communication that connects me with you. Your permission not yet given, I will curb that impulse. I await your response._

_Yours,_

_Spock_

Yours. Jim didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, which was fine, because he was pretty sure he was doing both. He scrolled to the top and read it all again, and then a third time.

“Your willing scribe.” _Good God, Spock,_ Jim thought; _I’d be your willing anything._

For a second he bent over and rested his forehead on the desk. Then he straightened up and started typing in a new message window. There was no question about his answer.

_Silly Spock,_ he typed. _Of course I feel just as sad as you do—probably worse, actually, since I don’t have your emotional controls. For the last day I’ve felt like I’ve been concussed and drugged and slugged in the stomach. This past weekend, though…there are no words for that weekend. Just know that it was the most wonderful time in my life, too._

_You said you’d do almost anything to keep me from pain. Maybe you’re right—maybe it would be wiser for both of us if we didn’t write. But if that’s wisdom, then I want nothing to do with it. I want you._

_All of this by way of saying that of course I want to write to you. I want to write pages and pages to you, until my keyboard breaks of overuse, until you get so sick of reading my letters that you have to start deleting them and cursing the networks that bring them to you. But don’t think that will stop me from writing._

_I still love you._

_Very much yours,_

_Jim_

_P.S. I’m going to hold you to blame if I end up not getting into Starfleet Academy. Today in school, I was so distracted that my math teacher asked me what an integral was meant to find, and I told her it was the volume under a curve._

Jim paused with his fingers hovering over the keyboard. Then he typed a P.P.S.

_I know exactly what you mean—I’m having the hardest time ending this letter too._

He hit send before he could let himself write anymore. Then he leaned back in his chair and scrubbed his face with his hands.

How long before Spock would read it? There were ways of sending interplanetary messages almost instantaneously, but they were expensive and only for emergencies. Messages of the kind he was allowed to send for free would probably take about a day to get to Vulcan. For the shuttle Spock was on, he had no idea.

There was still an ache in his chest. It had changed, though: it was still piercing, but it had a sweetness to it. The message had assuaged the pain. For now.

***

Jim felt like some of his sanity had returned that night. The message from Spock had cleared his head enough so that he could do some of the homework he hadn’t done that weekend. Homework turned out to be a good distraction; it was only every few minutes that he would find his thoughts wandering to the pair of warm eyes that he wished were beside him.

He managed to get about half of his backlog of work done before his mom came home for dinner. Jim went down to join her. It felt strange to be sitting in the same old dining room, eating spaghetti and meat sauce, just as if it were the week before and nothing had changed.

He was a little more adept than he had been at following a conversation. He must have done a good job seeming normal, because his mother commented on it as they were finishing up.

“I’m glad to see you looking better,” she said as he took the last of the garlic bread. “I was afraid the convention was too much for you.”

_Oh, it was,_ Jim thought. _Too much of a really amazing person who’s now halfway across the galaxy and out of reach._

“I just needed to catch up on sleep,” he said lightly as he finished the last piece of bread.

And then he went back to his bedroom, trailing his ache behind him.

By 11:00, he felt like if he read another word of a textbook he would scream. This would teach him not to go a whole weekend without doing homework again.

He snapped his Lit textbook closed and got up from his desk. He had basically memorized the message from Spock by now, and he let it play through his head while he brushed his teeth. Running those words through his head felt like breathing Spock in: the essence of him, the mind behind those dark eyes and almost-smile. Jim closed his eyes while he brushed and imagined that Spock was next to him, brushing his teeth while Jim did, spitting out water into the sink from that finely shaped mouth. That mouth that Jim wanted to sink his tongue into.

The memory of their tongues rubbing together shot straight through him like electricity. It was the first time in the day since Spock had been gone that Jim had felt that kind of physical desire. He could feel the heat in his blood, feel it beginning to pool in his groin. Oh, the memory of their tongues...tangled together in his mouth... He took a deep, steadying breath, put his toothbrush back in its holder, and went back into his bedroom.

The ghost of Spock followed him. His fingers trailed over Jim’s back as he got ready for bed. Spock’s hands were on his hips as he undressed, edging down the boxer shorts that kept his cock contained. Jim hissed at the feeling of cool air on that cock, already hard and hot. He stroked his hand along it and felt the touch like the scrape of a match against a matchbox, giving birth to flame.

Spock’s body was pressed hungrily against his now. The hot, heavy weight pressed him back into the bed, Spock’s mouth on his, tongues stroking. Spock’s pointed ears under Jim’s fingers.

Their hips together. Spock’s mouth on Jim’s cheek, jawbone, neck. Jim stroked his own hand up and down his cock, faster now, as his breath came in gasps. Imagined Spock’s hardness stroking against his own, Spock’s buttocks under his hands as he ground Spock down against him again and again, heard the Vulcan moan with desire, watched him arch over Jim and cry out his name as he—

Jim came with an explosion of all the unreleased sexual tension that had been simmering all weekend. The sharp pleasure of the orgasm brought with it waves of longing and love and loss that twisted through his stomach. The desire of his body left in its wake a deeper desire made him cold and empty. A fantasy of Spock—that was all he had to live on. All he would have for the next seven years.

Jim turned his head into the pillow and wondered how he would endure.


	8. Chapter 8

The letter from Spock seemed to have brought some of the color back into the world. Jim got to school the next morning and discovered that people had faces again. Faces he could even look into, and converse with, almost as if he were a normal human being whose heart wasn’t millions of miles away on Vulcan.

The pain wasn’t gone. It was like a toothache: always there, waxing and waning beneath the surface, sometimes bearable, and sometimes flaring into excruciating brilliance that overwhelmed all of Jim’s senses.

He could not predict what triggered its moments of intensity. He would be doing something innocuous, like putting his books in his locker, when suddenly the feeling of _Spock_ would rush in at him, fresh and vivid and sharp like shrapnel so that he would have to grip the cold edge of his locker and grit his teeth until the pain receded. Then he could manage to trudge away in the shell-shocked daze of a blast victim.

Mostly, though, it was okay—but different than it had been, before September. There were weird differences, like how his school didn’t seem to have as many girls as it used to. Jim remembered it as overflowing with girls, halls swimming with faces and figures that caught his eye and heated his imagination. Now all that seemed to be gone. His school seemed to have been wiped clean of anyone interesting to look at.

His friends were no problem. Jim had always had a good group of friends, people he hung out with during lunch and after school and on weekends. These were the guys who were on the baseball team with him, who had grown up in his neighborhood, who had been in cub scouts with him when they were kids. Jim had never felt lonely or isolated. But now, as he sat in their midst and laughed and talked, he realized that he wasn’t close to a single one of them. Not close enough, at any rate, for it to matter that he had this huge secret he didn’t want to tell them. Had they once been close, he wondered? What had changed?

He didn’t know, and he didn’t really care. His real life didn’t take place in school, or when he was hanging out with his friends. His real life took place when he sat down in front of his computer and wrote to Spock.

They wrote to each other every day. Page upon page, about everything that happened in their lives, everything that they thought about the world. Jim would read Spock’s letters and feel like he was living his life alongside him. They got into long passionate discussions about genetics and just-war theory and the future of the galaxy. It was illogical to speculate, Jim was told, but then he got three paragraphs on what would happen if current trends played out. Jim read this with a little smile on his lips, eyes leaping from one line to the next. And after he was done reading, he sat in front of the screen and wrapped his arms around his chest and ached to hear Spock’s voice.

He narrated letters to Spock in his head as he went through his day. _Just passed Peter Olsen in the hall, Spock,_ he wrote in his mind. _I think he’s being bullied by the upperclassmen. Why do kids do things like that? Is there a way we could change how we teach them so that they’d stop it?_ He would start letters to Spock in class when the teacher was going on about something he’d understood since junior high. Acres of tiny handwriting on scrap pieces of paper, on all topics under the sun, to be typed up and sent when he got home. Those words to Spock were like a lifeline, anchoring him to wholeness.

Jim was on the second cramped page of one of those letters one November day in English class when the teacher said something that made him snap his head up.

“The Vulcan poet Sovid,” Mrs. Wheelock was saying.

She was pointing to a slide on the vidboard. A Vulcan countenance, drawn in black lines.

Jim’s eyes latched onto that Vulcan face. Not the same—oh, no, not the same at all—but the very differences made that other face spring to Jim’s mind, the face he hadn’t seen in far too long. That face…oh, he could imagine every curve and plane. He could remember running his fingers over its softness. Why hadn’t he thought to take a holo while he had him near? Because it wouldn’t have been the same. _I don’t want the face,_ he thought. _I want you, Spock._

“The subject matter of Sovid’s poetry is much as you’d expect,” Mrs. Wheelock was saying now. “Lots of desert imagery: the harsh, red landscape under the hot Vulcan son. It is surprising, really, how evocative some of his imagery can be, given that he was a Vulcan. In fact, it can be tempting to read emotions into his poems, but it is important to remember that that is only an effect of our human perspective and not Sovid’s intent.”

She started talking about the text on the board, but Jim was caught in processing her last words. Had she really just implied…

“If we look at the second stanza—yes, Jim?” She turned to look at him.

Jim lowered his hand. “I’m sorry, what makes you think Sovid wasn’t trying to express emotion?”

She gave a little laugh. “Well, he was a Vulcan.”

His hand was shaking slightly. He gripped his pencil to make it stop. “Yes, but…” He paused, took a deep breath. “I’ve…well, I’ve known a few Vulcans,” he said. “I think it’s less that they don’t experience emotions, and more that they don’t express them, normally.”

“Interesting. There are many anthropologists who would disagree with you.” The teacher leaned against the desk with her arms crossed. “What makes you say so?”

_The feel of Spock’s lips against mine. The look in Spock’s eyes when I told him I loved him._ “Just…things they’ve said to me,” he said.

Mrs. Wheelock nodded in that noncommittal way of teachers who don’t want to come out and say an answer is wrong. “Well, that may be true,” she said. “But it’s certainly the case that traditional criticism has found very little of what we would call emotion in Sovid’s poetry. Let’s turn to page 422 in our textbooks...”

Jim felt a burning on his cheeks. He hoped he wasn’t blushing visibly. He wanted to leap up and shout that she was wrong, that he knew that Vulcans experienced emotions, that he read those emotions in every line of the messages he received from Spock…but he gripped his pencil tighter and turned to page 422.

The bell rang a few minutes later, and Jim was getting ready to escape as fast as possible when someone said his name. He turned to see Sally McKinnell, who sat in the seat next to him. “Jim, are you okay?” she asked.

He’d thought he was doing an okay job of hiding it, but Sally had known him for years; maybe she was better at reading him than he’d thought. “Sure,” he said, making himself smile an easy smile.

“Good,” she said. “You seemed kind of upset about that whole Vulcan thing.”

They started walking out of the classroom. “Nah, it just bothered me to hear her giving the wrong picture of Vulcans.”

She nodded. “I never knew those things about Vulcans and emotions. It must be so interesting to be friends with them.”

Interesting. That was the word. For a second he felt an urge to tell her everything: pour out the enormous, aching, unbearable pressure on his heart for someone else to collect. But not to Sally, and not in the hallway between classes. He had to get out of there before the pleasant expression on his face began to crack.

“Yup, definitely,” he said. “Well, this is me—see you later!” And he ducked down the next hallway, escaping into his physics class, leaving her in the swirling mob of students.

***

That night when he got home, he started another letter to Spock:

_I’m curious,_ he wrote. _I know this might not be something you like to talk about, so feel free not to answer if you don’t want to. But I was wondering how it works, with emotion...do you let yourself feel it? Are you supposed to? I feel like I’ve seen so much of it, with you, but usually Vulcans are so stoic. If they hide their emotion—why? Why hide what you feel?_

He got an answer in Spock’s letter the next day:

_Dear Jim,_

_The question you ask in your letter is one I’ve thought about extensively these past few months. I will first answer the question that underlies the ones you state: it is untrue that Vulcans, as popular rumor would have it, do not experience emotions. We do, and quite powerful ones. It is because of the power of our emotions that we need to learn such control of them._

_I used to believe that we needed to follow the ways of Surak because our emotions were stronger than the emotions of other beings. Having met you, I know that is not true. I have seen the same depth of emotion in you that I have felt in myself. Yet humans allow their emotions nearly free reign in their lives and do not suffer negative consequences to extent I would have expected. Our cultures’ two methods of coping represent a difference, therefore, of custom, and I cannot say that one way is superior to the other. But I will tell you of our way._

_The way of Surak is, quite simply, the way of logic. Its intent is not to remove all emotion from the Vulcan soul, but to prevent them from ruling us. A Vulcan child is taught from birth to fight against the uncontested sway of emotions over his or her free will. When we speak of logic, we refer to the ability to see through that haze of emotion to the end that is truly desired, and to divine the path that will take us there. The emotions that must be fought are primarily those that would pull us from that path. The human Paul referred to this struggle in one of your religious texts: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The role of logic is to permit us do that which we want to do, and to protect us from those emotions that would interfere. But the control of emotion must go further: for once in the grip of emotions, a soul cannot differentiate between those which are harmful and those which are helpful. Therefore, we must be able to distance ourselves from all emotion in order to follow the path of logic._

_But the rule is not absolute. There are cases where the cause of emotion is sufficient that even the leader of the Vulcan High Council would not frown upon it. And further, a question arises from the scenario I have outlined: what is the end we desire? The teachings of Surak do not supply that answer for us. It is an answer that each must determine for him or herself. And in many cases, that desired outcome may include some measure of emotion._

_When I met you, I did not immediately know if this was one of those cases. You inspired in me emotions that were strange and wonderful, and which I had never learned to subdue, for they were foreign to me. My mind was in turmoil that first night: my training told me that these emotions must be pushed aside for my own safety, but my soul had already recognized its kinship with yours and would not easily relinquish you. I spent many hours in meditation that first night before accepting that this emotion, this connection with you, might be an end in itself. To push it aside would be to stray from the path of logic._

_If this is your worry, Jim, then do not fear: I experience great emotion with regard to you. It does not shame me, for I have no doubt that the cause is sufficient. You—you are more than sufficient._

Jim scrolled back up and read the message over and over, and never before had any description of logic made him feel so sure about where he had given his heart.

***

The ache in his chest was unusually strong when he went to school the next day. He hadn’t slept well: he hadn’t seemed to be able to quiet the thoughts of logic, of Surak, of emotion, of kinship. He hadn’t been able to stop wishing that Spock were beside him on the pillow, lacing his fingers through Jim’s.

The fatigue must have been obvious on his face, because his friend Andy commented on it as soon as he got to school.

“Hey Jim!” he called out across the hallway. “Bad night?

Jim forced a smile as he joined the group of boys around the bank of lockers. “Yeah, I just couldn’t sleep.”

“Man, don’t let Sally see you like that,” Ben said.

“What?” Jim said. “Why not?”

There was an exchange of significant glances that put Jim immediately on the alert.

“Guys, what’s going on with Sally?” he asked.

Andy rolled his eyes at him. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed,” he said. “She’s crazy about you.”

_“Sally??”_ Jim said. “No way, guys. We’re friends.”

“Uh-huh,” Ben said over the laughter of the group. “Whatever you say, Jim.”

“Man, you don’t even have to try,” Andy said, shaking his head. “They just fall right into your lap.”

Jim didn’t answer. He was trying to remember Sally’s behavior around him over the last few months. He couldn’t recall anything specifically significant, but that didn’t mean anything: he hadn’t been noticing much of anything recently. He hoped there hadn’t been anything to notice.

***

November trailed slowly into December, and snows came to cover Riverside, Iowa. Jim wrote to Spock about it: the peace and stillness that descended with the blanket of snow, and the paradoxical wild struggle for survival on a stormy day out on the flatness of the plains. He built a fort out of snow high in the tangles of trees and boulders that overlooked the stream far behind his house, and he spent a few silent afternoons gazing at the variations of white and wishing there were another beside him to share body heat.

Christmas lights began to spring up throughout the town. On one frozen Saturday Jim and his mom went out to the woods at the edge of their property and felled a proud pine for their living room. Jim struggled to put it into words for Spock: the magic of having a live tree inside the house. That moment of wonder when he descended the stairs on a pitch-black morning before school and turned on the lights on the tree, so that those faint points of gold nestled amid branches were the only light in the world.

School was brutal for a few weeks, as it always was before a break, and it was all Jim could do to write to Spock and still be prepared for class every day. Then came that wonderful afternoon when the last exam had been taken and the students poured out of the school building to revel in the splendor of having nothing to do for the next two weeks.

That was December 23. Jim made use of his freedom by sleeping gloriously late on the 24th. He woke up somewhere in the vicinity of noon to the sight of a fresh blanket of snow out the window. He got up, stretched, scrubbed at his eyes with his fists, and almost tripped over something that had been slipped under his door while he’d been sleeping.

He bent and picked it up. It was an envelope, heavy paper in a creamy parchment color. On the front, written in black ink in a fine hand, was his name and address.

Handwriting he didn’t recognize. But his heart sped up even before he tore open the envelope.

Inside were two sheets of paper in the same cream-colored parchment covered in that fine, upright hand. Jim almost didn’t need to look at the name at the end of it, but he did anyway, and then he stood still for several minutes with the papers clutched in his hands, eyes closed. Savoring.

Back to bed. That was the only place. Jim scrambled back under the covers and propped himself up against the pillows. He took the first of the sheets of paper and began to read.

_My dearest Jim,_ the letter said,

_It is my intention that this letter reach you before Christmas. While the custom of gift-giving does not exist on Vulcan, I have been taught that it is important for humans. Consider this my gift to you._

_Since meeting you, I have learned that many things which should not logically matter do have a certain import. The color and shape of a pair of eyes, for example. Logic would tell us that these are mere biological accidents; yet when the image of yours comes before me, I temporarily lose the ability to speak. Or the feel of another’s skin. Logically, there can be no appreciable difference between the texture of one person’s skin and another’s; but I do not want to touch anyone’s but yours._

_Similarly, logic would have me believe that there is no difference between reading words on a computer screen and reading them in script. Certainly the former has all the advantages of efficiency and legibility. But I found, with that capacity I seem to be developing for detecting the import of the illogical, that there were words I would give you that could only be set down on paper. I wish you to sit in your bedroom in Iowa on the planet Earth and hold the same piece of paper that I have held here at my desk on Vulcan and trace the same ink with your fingers, while I tell you what I need to tell you._

_What I wish to tell you is this: I love you._

_I love you, Jim. I have loved you, I believe, since that first weekend we spent together, but it has taken me far longer than you to become certain I understood those words well enough to speak them. What has been baffling and mysterious to me seems to have come intuitively to you. I envy you that, and yet I don’t find myself in a position to begrudge anyone anything, for I know now that I love you._

_Is this a gift from me to you, or from you to me? I am beginning to understand that it may be both at once. I am overwhelmingly grateful for your existence. There are moments when I think your existence should be enough: that I should be content that such a person as you exists, even if it is far away from me where I cannot look upon you and touch you. But I cannot be content, for it is not enough. We are taught as children to accept the inevitable. But no doctrine of acceptance can make me cease missing you, for we are, I believe, meant to be a part of each other. It may not be a logical conclusion. But it is true._

_Jim, I miss you this day and always._

_I love you._

_Spock_

Jim sat still with the paper clutched in his hand and his eyes on those last few lines. _Love._ The word unspoken rang through the air, echoed in his head. It spun through the blood in his veins. _Love. Spock loves me._

He flipped back to the first page and read the letter again, all the way through, letting the words soak through him. Then he leaped out of bed and ran, laughing and whooping, down the stairs.

His mom poked her head into the hall, where he stood in his pajamas with a huge smile on his face. “What on earth is going on?” she asked. She held a dripping dish and a drying cloth in her hands.

Jim spread his arms wide. “It’s Christmas Eve, Mom!” he exclaimed.

She grinned and shook her head before turning back to the kitchen.


	9. Chapter 9

Sam came home that Christmas Eve day, and they spent the afternoon throwing snowballs and shaping cookie dough into gingerbread men. Jim couldn’t decide where to keep his letter: at first he folded it up and put it in his shirt pocket, but then he worried that it might get wet from the snow or—worst of all—discovered by a curious older brother. Those words were not meant for anyone else to see. Finally he slit the endpaper of one of his favorite books from childhood, the _Child’s Tales of King Arthur,_ and hid the letter behind it. When he pressed down the edges, he could barely tell it had been touched.

Then came the task of writing back. Jim sat down to it late that night, when the last candles had been extinguished and the gingerbread men were shut up in a cookie tin, leaving only their aroma to linger behind them. He smoothed a piece of clean white paper on his desk. He did not have parchment paper like Spock’s, but he had a pen that wanted to write “I love you” over and over and over, or maybe just the name “Spock.” He settled for writing both an embarrassing number of times.

_Dear Spock,_ he wrote, _I got your letter today, on Christmas Eve. You are the best Christmas present I could ever have asked for…_

He used the word “love” twenty-two times, and when he mailed the letter the next day, it was with a silly grin on his face and the feeling that he still hadn’t said it enough. 

Christmas vacation passed in a whirl of presents and family time and more messages to Spock, and then Sam was back at school and Jim faced the trek through the snow to the high school building every day. The letter stayed with him like a warm coal in his chest for weeks. He would go to the old _King Arthur_ book and pull the letter from its hiding spot and just finger the pages, or maybe let himself read a line or two. He didn’t want the words to get old. But by the end of two weeks he knew it backward and forward.

School remained brutal. The teachers seemed to be made spiteful by the ice and snow that kept up their relentless battle against the Iowa landscape. The student body, as a result, spent January mainly trying not to drown in homework.

Things were livened up a bit at the beginning of February by the appearance of Valentine’s Day decorations. The Valentine’s Day Dance was a tradition at Riverside High, and one that Jim had enjoyed quite a bit the previous year. He had asked a girl he’d had his eye on in Biology class—Lisa Burnside—and they had ended up making out behind the stage.

None of that this year. The Valentine’s Day decorations made him ache in a very familiar spot in his chest. _Six and a half years,_ he scribbled in margins during class, and calculated how many days and nights that would be.

There were other changes that came with the Valentine’s Day decorations. The school’s female student body seemed to have been transformed. Jim hadn’t really noticed a change last year, but this year, it was hard even for him not to notice how assiduously some of the girls were throwing themselves at him.

“You can’t blame them; you’ve been playing hard to get for months,” Andy said to him at lunch one day after two giggling freshmen had dropped off a bouquet of flowers.

“Who’s playing?” Jim grumbled.

Andy raised his eyebrows. “Seriously? You wouldn’t want to get some of that? What happened to you, man?”

Jim made a face and a noncommittal shrug. “Don’t they seem kind of…annoying?”

Andy laughed. “That’s your problem—it’s all gotten too easy for you,” he said. “You’re tired of them crumbling beneath your charms.”

“Whatever. You can have this,” Jim said, handing him the bouquet. “Give it to Veronica, or whoever it is you’re trying to trick into going to the dance with you.”

Andy ignored his offering and leaned back in his chair. “No flowers needed here. Veronica’s eating out of the palm of my hand.”

“I’ll take them.” Paul leaned over from the other side of Andy and took the flowers.

“For who?” Ben asked from his seat beside Jim.

Paul grinned. “I’ll never tell.”

“Lame.” Ben threw a carrot stick at him and turned to Jim. “Who are you taking to the dance?”

Jim shrugged. “Probably no one.”

Ben’s mouth widened into a grin. “That means you’re holding out on us.”

This set off a round of catcalls. “Someone special?” Andy wanted to know with a leer.

Jim knew how to play this game. He gave them all a cocky grin. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said, and got up, tipped an imaginary hat at all of them, and walked out of the cafeteria to the sound of their resumed catcalls.

This was going to be awkward, he reflected as he walked through the empty halls to his locker. He could play this card until the dance arrived, but his friends were going to notice when he didn’t show. Well, if last year’s dance was anything to go by, there would be bigger gossip come the following Monday that what Jim _hadn’t_ done.

Unless he went stag…? He’d never considered it before, but there was no reason he shouldn’t. Seemed kind of boring, though, especially if he wasn’t going to try to dance with anyone.

He paused in front of the gym and looked inside. It was dark now, the shadows of the basketball hoops falling across the floor that would be full of dancing people come Friday night. And…if he could go with Spock? He imagined what it would be like to take Spock by the hand and lead him into the gym, to rest his head on Spock’s shoulder while they swayed under the colored lights…

He bit his lip and hurried off to class, five minutes early, before he could break down and start bawling in front of the gymnasium.

***

He wrote to Spock about it that night.

_We’re having a Valentine’s Day Dance here, Spock,_ he wrote. _Probably not something you guys have on Vulcan. It’s a nice custom, though. You get to get dressed up and spend an evening with the person you like, or the person you love. If you were here, I would have asked you weeks ago. This Friday night I would come pick you up at your house, and you would show up at the door wearing black like you were on the first night I met you. And I would smile at the sight of you, framed in the light from the doorway of your house. Then you would get in the car and I’d drive you to school, our hands laced together, and you would tell me about the illogic of driving with only one hand, but if I tried to let go you would just hold tighter. And we would walk in with our hands still joined and drink some punch and maybe eat some terrible cookies. Then they’d play a slow song, and we would whirl off on the dance floor as if no one else in the world existed…_

_Someday, Spock. Someday we’ll live in the same place, and we’ll have all that._

_I love you._

The next day, as usual, Jim turned on his computer to find another message from Spock. He had received no fewer than twelve earlyValentine’s cards that day, and he set them on the corner of his desk with his school books before sitting down to read with a smile on his face. This was the only Valentine’s Day message he wanted.

_Dear Jim,_ he read. _What I am going to say is extremely difficult for me. Please do not think that I represent my emotions in writing this; but there are times when the path of logic…_

Jim stopped reading. He had the sensation that his throat was closing up. He shut his eyes and counted to twenty before opening them again, in the hopes that he had just misread.

He hadn’t. He read on.

_Dear Jim,_

_What I am going to say is extremely difficult for me. Please do not think that I represent my emotions in writing this; but there are times when the path of logic is the only correct one._

_I have come to the conclusion that I have been unforgivably selfish in holding your heart as I do. I have known this to be a probable truth for several months. However, I deluded myself into believing that this was the best thing for both of us, and that I was causing you no serious harm. I am forced to admit now that I was wrong._

_These experiences you mention in your last message should be a part of your life. By holding onto your heart, I am keeping you from them. You should be forming connections with others of your own age and species—others who are physically with you and who can love you now as you need to be loved. You should not be living seven years in the future._

_I describe my actions as selfish because these concerns are not as grave in my case. Vulcans do not date, and connection with others is not as important to our well-being as it is to that of humans. Had I never met you, my behavior toward my peers would be no different than it is now. But you—yours is a social species. Our relationship isolates you in ways that can only be hurtful, and I could not forgive myself for allowing that harm to continue._

_I do not ask you to cease communication with me. Truly, I could not bring myself to ask such a thing. But if that is what you need in order to live the kind of life you need, then I will grant it to you._

_I acknowledge that you may not view this as wisdom. I ask you to believe me, however, and to consider carefully before rejecting my words out of hand. I may not know much about humans, but I know a great deal about solitude. It is not what you were meant for, Jim. I cannot hold onto your love if it means isolation for you. I do not wish you to suffer. I wish you to be happy, and happiness for you must involve other people._

_Please—go to the dance, Jim. Go with someone who can give you love, and who can make you happy in the present as I cannot._

_Spock_

Jim could not breathe.

There was no breath in his lungs. Nothing was moving in his body anymore: no air, no blood, no thoughts. His hand was twisted around a pencil that had broken in half.

He pushed back the chair and stood up. He stumbled a bit as he went to the bureau, but he righted himself and found his wool socks and an extra sweater. He pulled them on and buttoned his coat on top of all that. Then his hat, and gloves, and boots—faster now, fingers fumbling over boot laces in his urgency to get _out,_ get _out,_ get _out_ of there—

He ran downstairs and out the back door. By the time he got twenty paces into the lawn, his breath was heaving on the edge of sobs. He leaned over and scooped up a handful of snow. He squeezed it together, packed it as tight as it would go, and then reared back and slammed it through the air towards the trunk of the nearest maple.

It hit with a sharp thud and burst apart. Jim was already scooping up another handful. One after another, he pelted snowballs at the tree where they filled the night with their explosions. The ice-covered branches rocked under the onslaught. Slamming snow—the bursts of powder in the air—the force of his arm as he threw, and threw, and—

His arm was trembling with exhaustion by the time it stopped. His whole body was trembling, and his chest was heaving. The night was suddenly very silent. He stood there in the blue-gray darkness of the snow-covered night as the cold seeped through his clothing and took up residence in his bones.

“You want me to see other people, Spock?” he whispered to the night. “Fine. I will.”


	10. Chapter 10

Jim spent the night trying to survive. He lay in his bed in the darkness of his room and felt at every moment that he might not live to see the next. There were no thoughts in his head; the pain seemed to have moved to his body. Surely his chest could not keep breathing through this—his blood could not keep flowing—his body could not stay alive with this pain at its center. This crushing feeling, the feeling of the world collapsing around him, surely this must be death.

But somehow he was still alive when the dark of the night turned to the gray of morning. He turned his head away from the light filtering through the window blinds. He couldn’t remember if he had slept: it was one of those nights that seemed to pass in fits and jumps, so maybe he had. But his body felt the bruises of every nighttime pain as he dragged it out of bed.

Once at school, he mostly felt numb, like the pain was lurking below the surface, but not touching him at the moment. It was kept at bay by the determination that had come upon him the previous night. He knew what he was going to do now.

There were giggling girls in the hall as usual when he walked into the school. Jim didn’t pay them any attention. He went to his locker and hung up his coat. Then, books in hand, he walked quickly back down the hall, searching.

He found what he was looking for one hallway over. She was putting her backpack in her locker, blond ponytail catching the sun from a nearby window. Jim slowed down to a more normal speed as he approached.

“Hey, Sally,” he said.

She looked up in surprise. “Jim.” There was a pause while she looked more closely at his face. “Are you okay?”

Damn it. He hadn’t wanted it to be that obvious. “Yeah, I just had a late night,” he said. “Listen, I was wondering—do you want to go to the dance with me tomorrow night?”

Sally’s face lit up like he’d flipped on a switch. Her eyes positively glowed at him. “I would love to,” she said.

Jim felt a twinge of guilt at the look she was giving him—but his determination was strong enough to wash it away. Spock had told him to see other people, and he was seeing other people. “Great,” he said with something that hopefully resembled a grin. “I’ll pick you up at eight?”

If his grin was off, she was too elated to notice. “Sure,” she said, and picked up her textbooks and practically floated off to class without remembering to shut her locker.

Jim shut it for her. Then he leaned against the locker bank and fought off a wave of nausea. It was a minute or two before he could straighten up and head off for History class, but he went with his spine straight and his jaw set. He was doing what he intended to do.

***

The next day and a half were—endless. Neutral. Nothing. Brutal. But the dance was a solid goal, a destination. Jim was doing what Spock had told him to: taking someone to the dance. He refused to let himself look beyond that. He suspected that if he did, he would curl up into a ball on the Physics lab floor and never be able to move again.

Time seemed to slow down on Friday afternoon. Jim came home from school feeling antsy. He didn’t want to go into his room, because his room had his computer, so he sat in the living room and did his math homework. He found himself racing through the problems in about half the time it should have taken him. Part of him knew he should go back and redo them, slowly, but the part of him that was running on nervous energy rejected that idea. Instead he tried doing some English reading, and ended up pacing back and forth through the living room, thinking of nothing at all.

At seven he went upstairs to get ready. He showered briskly, with the water so cold it made him shiver a little. He splashed on aftershave and pulled on his tuxedo. It was hanging in the back of his closet, still in its dry cleaning bag. He hadn’t worn it since—

Since that night at the conference. Jim felt a sudden impulse to gag. He fought it by clenching his stomach and straightening his cuffs. 

He was down the road in Sally’s driveway at eight o’clock sharp. He felt as if his whole body had been pulled tight with tension, a string drawn too taut, but his hand was steady as he rang the doorbell.

Sally’s mother answered the door and broke into a smile at the sight of him. He hadn’t seen her in years, ever since he and Sally had used to play in her backyard in elementary school. “Why, hello, Jim,” she said.

“Hi, Mrs. McKinnell. Is Sally ready?”

He was shown into the hall. “Sally!” her mother called. “Jim is here!”

“Coming!” Sally’s voice called back.

A moment later, she appeared over the railing on the second floor. Her hair was swept back elaborately, and her face was flushed with joy. She disappeared for a moment, and then she was sweeping down the staircase like a heroine in a movie. It could all have been a scene from a movie, actually: the hovering parents, the radiant girl coming down the staircase in a pale pink dress to leave for the dance on the arm of the boy of her dreams. All of it right, except for…

Jim bit down on his lip and on the thought. Sally was at the bottom of the staircase now. He forced himself to smile.

“You look beautiful,” he said. She beamed and took his arm.

Jim didn’t say much on the way to the school. He had never had trouble talking to Sally before: they had always been good at being casual friends. But now he was wound tighter than an antique clock.

Sally didn’t seem to notice. It was so evident that she was perfectly happy to be there with him. Even Jim could sense it, through his haze of nervous tension. There was a moment, while they were waiting at a red light, when he wondered what he was doing here. She so obviously thought he had asked her because he liked her. And he did, but not in that way—he couldn’t possibly like her in that way. He couldn’t like anyone else that way, not when Spock—

No. No, he would _not_ think about Spock. Spock had told him to see other people, and that was what he was going to do, goddamn it, even if it killed him.

He was gripping the steering wheel too tightly. He made himself relax his grip and laugh at the story Sally was telling. She didn’t notice that his laughter was strained; she was animated, hands moving as she transitioned into another story.

By the time they got to the school, Jim’s arms and shoulders were aching from holding the wheel. He climbed out of the car and took a few deep breaths of the night air before going to open Sally’s door.

Other kids were heading into the school, girls’ dresses shining under the floodlights. Jim caught sight of Andy and Veronica as he passed through the main doors. Andy shot a significant look at Jim’s date and waggled his eyebrows. Jim rolled his eyes.

The gym was crowded with students laughing and talking. Jim could feel the familiar atmosphere of a dance enveloping him and carrying him along. They went to put their things down on one of the tables that ringed the room. Sally had one of those little fancy purses that looked as though it could barely hold a set of keys, and Jim managed to tease her about it as she tucked it under their coats. She laughed at his words as they went over to the punch table. _I can do this,_ he thought; _I can make it through this evening._

They spent the first half hour or so talking to people around the refreshments. Jim managed to remember the answers to small-talk questions, and he even laughed at some of his friends’ teasing. Sally stood by his side and glowed and bubbled with conversation. Jim could see people’s eyes on them, recategorizing them as a couple. His sense of determination flared.

People started to drift out to the dance floor before too long. Jim let Sally pull him along to dance to a few fast songs. He always felt a little self-conscious with this kind of dancing, but the lights were low and the energy of the crowd infected him. By the third song, he felt himself relaxing into it, even having fun. He caught Sally’s eye and smiled a smile that was only about a third of the way forced.

Then the music changed, and a slow song came on. The undifferentiated mass of people began to divide into couples. Sally moved towards Jim, of course. She was obviously expecting him to dance with her; that was what people did at dances. That was what he’d come for. She stepped into his space and rested her hands on his shoulders, the most natural thing in the world.

And Jim froze.

He was completely unable to move. Several beats of the song went by in which he stood frozen.

Sally looked at him with a little furrow between her eyes. “Jim? What’s wrong?”

Air. There was no air. The room seemed to drift and blur around him. Her hands on his shoulders were choking him. He took a step away from her—a little too abruptly, but he couldn’t take it a second longer, couldn’t…

“Jim?”

Her eyes were still on him, wide and blue.

“Sally. I’m sorry.” The air came out of his lungs like it was forced out with a bellows.

“Jim, what is it?” More urgency in her voice now. She went to put her hand on his arm, but he flinched away, and she let it fall.

“I can’t be with you,” he said. His voice rough, rasping, but she heard him. He could tell by the shock and pain that hit her face. “I’m…in love with someone else.”

Beat, beat, beat while they stood there. The other couples swayed around them.

Then, “Oh,” she said, her voice small. The glowing was gone now. The plug had been pulled. “Where is she?” she asked.

Jim didn’t bother to correct the pronoun choice. “Very far away.”

“Then…” She drew a deep breath. “Maybe we could…”

He shook his head. “No.”

The silence was a creature, stretching between them. Jim felt suddenly that he needed to leave, right away, before he started to… He cleared his throat and forced out words. “Do, uh…do you want to stay?”

Her eyes weren’t on him anymore; they were looking at the floor, somewhere beyond his left elbow. “I’ll get a ride with Amy.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I can drive you…”

She shook her head quickly. “No.”

He nodded. He felt as if the pieces of himself were about to shake apart, and he needed to get out of there. “I’ll, um…have a good night,” he said, and then he was turning and pushing his way out from among the swaying couples. He grabbed his coat and speed-walked to the door.

Outside the cold hit him like a blow. He started shaking as soon as he stepped into it. He went to his car and turned the heat up to full, his teeth chattering as he waited for it to warm up. That was when everything broke apart. The tears poured down his face like rain on a windshield, coming out in great noisy sobs against the hum of the car. He knew he should wait until he calmed down to drive home, but he couldn’t, and so he drove with the tears obscuring his vision.

There was no one on the road anyway. The lights were on in his house when he pulled into the driveway. He came through the door and went straight to the stairway, not stopping when he heard his mom come out of the living room. “Jim? What’s wrong? Did you and Sally…”

He just kept going, up the stairs and into his room, where he shut the door and blocked out the world. The bed caught his shaking body. The sobs still held him, his body in the grips in the grips of a violent storm beyond his control. It tore through him and turned everything inside out. Emotions carefully packed away were torn loose, set free to rampage about his body. And from the wreckage, up from the depths, floated a single word—

“Spock,” he whispered into the dampness of his sheets. “Spock Spock Spock Spock Spock Spock Spock…”

The longing he had suppressed for the last two days floated up with the name. The desire to have Spock here, to be able to hold him, spread throughout his body to the very tips of his fingers. An agony of wanting. He let it soak in, took the wanting to heart and let it stab him, welcomed the pain with gritted teeth.

His sobs were gone now. In their place came a wave of exhaustion that mixed with the shimmering field of _want._ Jim rolled off of bed and turned on his computer.

There were no messages in his inbox. He hadn’t expected any. He opened a fresh message window and started from scratch.

_Dear Spock,_ he wrote.

_I took your advice. I tried taking someone else to the dance. And I got through it all fine, up until the actual dancing. And then…I just couldn’t, Spock. I broke down, right there in the dance floor. The thought of taking someone else in my arms, having their arms around me…I was stupid to ever think that I could manage that. I physically couldn’t do it._

_And that’s the problem with your advice, Spock. You may be completely right—maybe I would be happier if I could date someone else. But it doesn’t matter. Because the thing is, I’m yours. I’m yours, even if you don’t claim me. Even if we never see each other again, even if you don’t speak to me until the day I die, I’ll still be yours. That was a done deal from the moment our eyes first met._

_Maybe it wasn’t, for you. Maybe you can let go of this thing we have, take your heart back—but I can’t. There is no one for me but you._

_And more importantly, I don’t want there to be. I don’t care what price I have to pay—I’ll pay it fifteen times over, if it means I get to be with you. I love you, Spock. I love every single bit of you: your brain, your face, your eyebrows, your tiniest toenail, your heart. Most of all, your heart. I even love the part of you that told me to go off and forget you, because I know that part of you loves me enough to want me to be happy. But you were wrong, Spock—there is no happiness for me outside of you. So I’ll be here, and I’ll be yours, because there is no way for me to ever be anything else._

_Love you always, Spock._

_Your Jim_

The words hung on the screen after Jim finished typing. He stared at them and felt not the tiniest hint of doubt: only bone-deep security that they were right.

He hit send. Then he rolled back into bed and fell into a sleep that lasted until the next morning’s sun had climbed high in the sky.


	11. Chapter 11

Jim was awoken around noon the next day by an insistent chiming sound. For a few seconds he was completely disoriented; then he realized that the sound was coming from his computer, and he untangled his limbs from his sheets and staggered across the room to his desk chair.

His computer had never made a sound like that before. He unglued his eyelids and regarded it for a moment before he realized that the monitor was turned off, and probably the first thing he should do was to fix that.

He did so—and Spock’s face appeared on the screen before him.

The sight hit Jim like the shock wave from an explosion. It was really Spock’s face—not a picture. Living, breathing, looking at him with that expression in his eyes that made Jim’s stomach turn molten. “Spock,” he whispered.

“Jim,” Spock answered in his deep baritone. The sound of that voice made Jim’s insides leap, and for a few moments he could not emerge from the shock into speech.

He saw the expression in Spock’s eyes falter, grow concerned. “Jim? Are you all right?”

Jim swallowed and drew breath. “Sorry,” he managed to say. “I’d forgotten what your voice sounds like.”

He saw warmth bloom again in Spock’s eyes. He felt his own face break into a smile in response. For a long moment minute he just drank in the sight of that face before him while Spock gazed back. He could feel the sight restoring something inside him, soothing a hundred thousand little scrapes and damages that had accrued over the months of absence. His insides were being righted, as if he were returning to health after a long illness. “Spock,” he said again, hearing the smile in his own voice. “How…how did you make this call?”

“I asked my father if I could use his account to speak to a friend I had met on Earth at the Starfleet Conference,” Spock said. “I told him I believed our conversation would be enriching.”

Jim felt his smile stretch wider. It was true, of course—and so very Spock. “I’m so glad,” he said.

“Jim.” Spock’s eyes grew more serious. “I believe…I was in error when I wrote you last week.”

“Oh, Spock,” Jim said. He wanted so badly to reach out and touch that he put his hand to the screen, as if he could stroke Spock’s cheek across millions of miles of space. Spock’s eyes closed and he leaned forward, as if to lean into Jim’s touch. Jim saw him take a deep and steadying breath before he opened his eyes again. When he did, they were bright with the emotion that Jim knew by now that he didn’t share with anyone else.

“I was…wrong…to think that I needed to protect you in that way,” Spock said.

“You weren’t totally wrong,” Jim said. “It made sense—you always make sense—but it won’t work for us.”

“Perhaps my error lay in assuming that this situation should make sense,” Spock said.

Jim grinned broadly. “Welcome to the world of emotions,” he said.

Spock’s eyebrow rose. “The world without them was considerably simpler,” he said.

“But not half as much fun,” Jim said. There was elation leaping all through him. Spock. Spock telling him that he had been wrong, that they should be together, that Jim did not have to live in the kind of pain that had haunted the past few days.

Spock’s voice softened again. “Jim. I wish to apologize for causing you the experience you mention in your letter.”

“It’s okay,” Jim said. Everything was okay now, if Spock was his again. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“It is not ‘okay,’ as you put it,” Spock said. His face was solemn and intent. “I have caused you pain.”

“Only because you were trying not to,” Jim said. “I don’t care.” And he didn’t. Not now.

Spock swallowed visibly. “Jim...in your letter...”

“Yes?” Jim prompted when Spock didn’t say anything. 

Spock’s eyes weren’t looking at the screen anymore. “You said…you were mine…even if I did not claim you.” He raised his eyes swiftly. “I find…that I do want to make that claim.”

The look in Spock’s eyes made Jim’s stomach clench in desire. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, I am yours.”

Spock looked up at him through his eyelashes. Jim could see the shyness written all over his face, but a warm shyness, and one that kindled the flames that had begun in Jim’s belly. “I would like you to know that I am the same. Yours to claim—if you wish to.”

“I do,” Jim breathed. “Oh, I do.”

Their eyes were locked on each other, and their words seemed to hang in a hush in the air. Jim could feel them wrapping around him, merging with the image in front of him to set his whole body alight. Spock’s skin, so soft, and those lips that he could remember meeting with his own, sealing promises in the slide of tongue against tongue.

“So we’re in this for good,” Jim said. “No more deciding it’s unwise or that we shouldn’t be together. This is it.”

“Agreed,” Spock said, his voice soft and deep.

Jim felt his mouth widen into a smile. They hadn’t discussed that before—no mention of forever or the long term. And even now they weren’t saying that, weren’t using those exact words, but he could feel their future solidifying between them. Spock’s eyes were smiling at him, their corners crinkling in that way only Spock’s eyes had.

“God, I want to touch you so badly,” Jim said. “Why is this thing not multisensory?”

Amusement quirked in Spock’s eyes. Their faces were so close together now, barely six inches apart without the screen. The pull was so strong it was all Jim could do not to lean in further. He could read the longing in Spock’s face.

“Six and a half years,” Jim murmured.

Spock’s eyes flicked down to his mouth, then back up again, dark pools of want that held Jim close. “And then…”

“Then I’ll hold you in my arms again,” Jim said.

Spock breathed in sharply. The sound sent a flash of heat straight to Jim’s groin. For a moment the intensity grew. Jim wasn’t sure what would happen next—what could happen—but he felt that something…

Then Spock was leaning back from the screen, taking a shaky breath.

“I…I believe we will need to end this soon,” Spock said. His eyes cut away to the door, and Jim could see that he was trying to regain control of himself. “I am in my father’s study.”

A dart of panic shot through Jim’s chest. “Spock,” he said in an involuntary plea.

Spock must have heard the desperation in his tone, for he met Jim’s eyes again. He regarded him silently for a moment, then spoke, his voice more urgent than normal. “Jim,” he said. “I do not know if I will be able to call again. But I wish to give you my word. I will not ask you again to turn away from what is between us. And if it is possible, at any point, for us to be together, I swear that I will do what I can to make that happen.”

Jim felt a warm glow in his chest that was tempered by the fear and sadness coating his throat. Any minute now, that screen was going to go dark, and that face would be gone. “Spock, don’t go,” he whispered.

“Jim,” he said, and that was all he needed to say, for his eyes said the rest. Jim gazed into those eyes he had first seen across a Starfleet ballroom, those eyes that he had been deprived of for so many months, trying to gorge against the long, empty times to come.

“I love you,” he whispered to Spock.

Spock’s hand flickered, moving toward the screen and then pulling back as if he wanted to touch. But Jim finished the gesture for him: he placed his palm flat against the screen, video pixels be damned. Spock’s hand came up and pressed against it, so that for a moment, across all the light-years of space, they were almost together. Almost.

“I love you,” Spock said in his deep voice, and then there was a beat of silence before the screen switched off.

Jim’s head dropped, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the wave of emotion that rose in him.

***

He had been wrong about one thing, he discovered on Monday: he _was_ the biggest gossip the day after the dance. Everyone was talking about how he had left Sally in the middle of the dance floor. Jim was surprised the first time he heard mention of it on Monday morning. It seemed as if it had been so long ago—that several weeks at least had passed in the interim. But it was all anyone could talk about. Everyone wanted to know who had so stolen Jim’s heart that he couldn’t even manage a single dance with Sally McKinnell.

At least, that seemed to be the theory. Jim wasn’t sure how they had arrived at it—someone must have overheard some of his and Sally’s conversation on the dance floor. There were a few more bizarre theories floating about, including one about his intention to remain celibate for life, but in general people seemed convinced that he had a secret lover and determined to find out who it was.

Jim didn’t say a word. He just smiled silently at all the teasing and let people believe what they would.

It was harder to maintain that smile when he was on his own. In some ways, the phone call had made him feel better: the knowledge the Spock loved him and would fight for their relationship was knowledge he could live on for quite a while. But seeing Spock’s face had made the ache in his chest so much fresher. He had learned to live with a low-level degree of pain over the past months, and then the sight of those eyes and the sound of that voice had dashed all his comfortable coping mechanisms to pieces. He spent a lot of time that week walking the snow-covered trails in the woods behind his house and waiting for the pain to pass.

He was on one of those trails on Thursday afternoon, trying to avoid pondering the many Spockless years before him, when he looked up and saw Sally.

Jim paused. She evidently hadn’t seen him yet: she was just walking along in her pale-blue ski jacket, head down and shoulders hunched, looking like she felt about as miserable he did. He could tell the moment she noticed him, because she looked up and froze in place.

For a few seconds there was silence. Then, “Sorry,” she said. “These are your lands, aren’t they?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jim said. “You’re always welcome here.”

There was a pause in which Jim knew they were both contemplating the irony of that statement: while she may have been welcome on the lands, there was another way in which he couldn’t welcome her at all.

Jim thought about asking how she was and decided that sounded too patronizing. He settled for, “How’s it going?”

“I’m okay.” She wrapped her arms around her chest, looking at the ground. “I wish the kids at school would shut up, though.”

He felt a stab of guilt. He had been more or less avoiding her for the past few days, and it hadn’t occurred to him to worry that she, too, would be the victim of teasing. “Have they been bugging you? I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s fine.” She shrugged, her eyes still on the path, and he could hear the mirthless humor in her voice. “They’re just curious about who you left me for.”

Jim gave a short laugh. “Yeah, they’ve been asking me the same thing.”

Sally raised her eyes to meet his. “Will you tell me?” she asked, her voice suddenly intent. “Will you tell me who she is?”

Jim stared back in surprise at the question. She wasn’t asking the way the kids at school did; this wasn’t curiosity. This was something else, a need to know why she’d been rejected. Who she’d been rejected for.

He scuffed his shoe on the snow-covered path. “It’s…well, it’s not actually a she,” he said.

There was a split-second pause. Then her eyes widened. Jim saw her open her mouth, pause, and close it again. Then finally she just said, “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Jim said.

There was another pause in which it was clear that she didn’t know what to say. “Is he…is he someone we know?” she asked at last.

“No,” Jim said. “Not at all. I was telling the truth—he’s very far away. And he…well, he’d told me I should try seeing someone else. And so I thought I’d give it a try, because I was mad, and I thought I could do it, and it seemed the only thing I could do…I’m so sorry, Sally. I didn’t think about how it would affect you.”

“It’s okay,” she said in a soft voice. She fiddled with the zipper on her coat pocket. “Is that why you haven’t told any of the kids at school? Because it’s a he?”

Her question took Jim by surprise. His first instinct was to deny it, and then he realized that he didn’t know the answer. Why _hadn’t_ he told anyone at school?

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” he said, after thinking a minute. “It just feels really…private. Not something I wanted to share with anyone.”

She nodded. “Then why did you tell me?” she asked.

He shrugged. “It just seemed like the right thing to do.” He smiled a little at the confusion on her face. “I don’t know. Maybe I felt like I owed it to you, or maybe I just felt the need to tell someone. Or maybe because I want us to be friends, and I didn’t feel like we could be until I told you.”

She regarded him for a moment, the ghost of a smile on her face. “All right,” she said. “I’d like that.”

Jim felt his smile broaden, and watched hers do so slightly as well, like a tiny reflection of his own.

“Just…not just yet, okay?” she said. “Give me a little time.”

“Yeah, I understand,” he said. “I’ll be around.” He gave her a parting smile, then took a step to the right so she could pass him on the path. She did, ducking her head as she went by him.

He started walking again but was stopped by her voice before he could get two steps. “Jim,” she said when he’d turned around. “You said he was far away. Is it hard? Not being able to be with him?”

Jim felt a fresh wave of pain hit his chest. He closed his eyes against it for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it is.”

She held his gaze for a minute. “I know the feeling,” she said, and she turned and walked away.


	12. Chapter 12

Things got a little better as the spring progressed. The baseball season started at school, and that kept Jim so busy that there were nights when he could barely keep his eyes open long enough to write to Spock. _Spock,_ he’d write, _I’m dropping from exhaustion right now. But I promised I’d tell you about the game…_ Then he’d fall into bed fifteen minutes later and wish it was Spock’s arms he was falling into.

A few times he dreamed about Spock, and those were the best times of all. In his memories, it was hard to be sure that this was how Spock’s face had _really_ looked, this had _really_ been its expression. But in his dreams Spock looked just as vivid and not-quite-predictable as he had been on the computer screen during the subspace phone call, or even in real life, back in September. It was as if a little dose of the real Spock had been injected in his life, like a gust of fresh air. Those dreams were enough to keep him going for days.

But there were also occasional moments of fear. Jim would be going about his day, and suddenly he would be hit with the thought that Spock was fading from his life, that the person he’d come to love so desperately would eventually cease to matter to him. Those were the times when he wanted more than anything to have a subspace account he could use to call Spock immediately. But such things were expensive and not issued to minors, and so instead he would go for a run, or head to the batting cages and swing until his arms ached. Then he would go back home and reread Spock’s messages and write, and write, and write to him.

The weather started to get warmer. The world began to turn green again, the ground was thick with mud from the spring rains, and Jim could go outside with just a light jacket. And one day he was sitting in the living room, looking out the back window, when the large tree in the middle of the backyard caught his eye, and he remembered that he’d had plans.

_Spock,_ was his immediate thought, _I want to tell you about this. Why are you not here?_

But since he couldn’t talk to Spock, Jim got out a big pad of drafting paper and started to sketch.

***

It was a few weeks later that Jim received a P.S. in one of his letters from Spock:

_P.S. Perhaps you think I am unaware that tomorrow is your birthday. It seems you were intending to withhold this information from me; but unfortunately, you did not take into account my skill at reading public records._

Jim’s face broke out into a grin. Whoever said that Vulcans had no sense of humor had no idea what they were talking about. Either that, or Spock’s human mother had just trained him very, very well.

Even better than Jim had expected, as it turned out—because the next day, when he woke up, there was a surprise waiting for him.

His mother delivered it herself. She woke Jim up with a kiss to his forehead that made him squawk and bat her away.

“Happy birthday,” she said as she threw open the curtains.

“Mom,” he groaned, squinting his eyes against the light and trying to make out his alarm clock. It couldn’t possibly be time to get up already.

Something solid was dropped on his chest. “This came for you,” she said. “It seems you have an admirer.”

The sleepiness fled Jim’s system. “Who’s it from?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

“No return address,” she said. Her hand ruffled his hair. “Come down soon; I’ve made breakfast.”

The bedroom door shut behind her. Jim sat up to examine the package: plain brown paper, with a strange postmark he didn’t recognize. But long, elegant handwriting that he very much did.

“Spock, you’re showing me up,” he murmured with a grin. “I’ve got to get better at this stuff.”

The seam on the paper wasn’t easy to find. Jim didn’t hurry in his search for it; he liked having the package in his hands, the full and happy feeling it gave him. Finally he pulled at a single piece of strong tape on a corner, and the whole thing unfolded like an origami project.

Inside was something barely bigger than a credit chip, wrapped in bright blue paper, and a letter written on a single sheet of paper. Jim opened the letter first.

_Dear Jim,_ it said in its elegant flowing handwriting,

_You are now sixteen. An arbitrary demarcation of time, perhaps, but I understand that that number holds cultural significance for you, and as a Vulcan I cannot hold rites of passage illogical. On Earth as on Vulcan, they are a way to transition from one state to the next, a way to mark change that might otherwise be gradual and hard to comprehend. And it will always bring me pleasure to celebrate you._

_Once again I find myself in a position to pass an object from my hands to yours. Yet I find myself wishing against all logic that I were in your hands instead of this piece of paper, and I can only hope that one day it will be true._

_Had I freedom of choice, I would not have sent you the gift you have before you. My choice of celebration would have been more direct: I would have come to you myself and demonstrated my affection upon your person by measures I can only now envision. Lacking that possibility, I have sent you what piece of myself I can. It was written for you. In one sense, I know you will not understand it; but in another, I have no doubt that you will._

_I wish you a happy birthday, Jim._

_In love,_

_Spock_

Jim closed his eyes and felt the gut-wrenching wish that Spock were, in fact, before him in person. What Spock was imagining, he could picture only too easily…

But Spock said he had given a part of himself. Jim picked up the little blue object that lay beneath the letter. It was very thin, almost as if there were nothing inside the bright paper. Where had Spock even found paper like that? He couldn’t imagine Vulcans went in for wrapping gifts very often.

He pulled the paper off to find a tiny data disk. He turned it over a few times, but there was nothing written on it. What had Spock sent him that needed to go on a data disk? A longer letter? A…a technical manual?

Jim got out of bed and slipped the disk into his computer.

A music file icon appeared on his screen. Jim raised his eyebrows, but he seated his headphones in his ears and clicked it open.

The soft strumming of a stringed instrument. Jim didn’t have the musical background to identify the instrument, but he liked the chords it played immediately—soft, haunting, as if they were on the brink of sadness but not quite there. He sat back and prepared to let the music wash over him.

Then a voice started to sing, and that changed everything.

Jim had never heard Spock’s singing voice. His speaking voice, sure, and that might have led him to guess that Spock’s singing voice would be good—but not like this. There was a deep, rich power in this voice that he had never imagined. And yet there was no doubt that it was Spock’s. It seemed to pierce all the way through him with every note.

It was singing a soft melody in a language full of foreign sounds that Jim could not understand. And yet the sound of them made his heart leap to his throat and his blood course through his veins as if he wanted to get up and run, or move, or fight. But the music held him fast.

And what music. The melody grew and built and filled the world around him. Jim felt like his body was an instrument and the music was playing him. Spock sang to him, his voice rising and falling in Jim’s ear, singing words in that foreign tongue that Jim now wanted to learn, wanted to speak, wanted to hear spoken over him in the night…

Spock’s voice brought the song to a crest, ringing and deep, and then left it hanging as the music came winding down, curling back into itself in a hush of long trailing notes that seemed to hold exquisite longing. Jim’s arms were wrapped around his chest, and he felt as if never before had he heard a real piece of music.

“Spock,” he whispered to the air. “Oh, Spock, Spock, Spock.” Never again would Jim forget what his voice sounded like. Jim would have the song to listen to again and again now, and Spock would always be in his ear.

It was a very good birthday.

***

School ended a few weeks later. Jim had a summer job working with one of the professors at his mom’s university, learning advanced laboratory techniques that would probably be helpful in his courses at Starfleet Academy someday, if he ever ended up there. He denied to himself that Spock was the reason he had applied for this particular job, but there was no denying that the appeal of science had seemed a little greater since he had seen the passion for it shining in Spock’s face. He also couldn’t deny that he liked being about to talk to Spock about it, in their letters. There was more than one time when Jim showed up in the lab knowing far more than he should have about some advanced discipline or other, and he had to grin privately at the professor’s confusion.

He spent his spare time that summer in the yard behind his house, building. Scrap wood from the town lumber yard was cut down to size, nails were hammered in, rough edges were sanded off…and before Jim’s eyes, in the great maple tree just beyond the picture window, a structure began to take shape.

He didn’t mention his project to Spock. At first he had intended to, but then for some reason he held back. As long as he didn’t mention it, he could entertain the daydream that someday Spock would come to Iowa and Jim would show it to him and see the flash of surprise and delight in his eyes. He could feel that he was building it _for_ Spock.

In any case, they had plenty of other things to write about. Now that Jim didn’t have school, he finally had time to write as much as he wanted. The science subjects alone would have filled a lengthy message every day, but they talked about everything under the sun—everything that was important to either of them. It was the focus of Jim’s day, that hour when he would sit down at his computer every night and pour out all his thoughts to Spock, and he kept to it faithfully. It was the only way he could feel that Spock was with him, that he wasn’t slipping away.

Then came the day in August when a message didn’t come.

The empty message box didn’t strike Jim as so unusual. There had been days when each of them had missed messages before, generally because of illness (Jim’s) or travel (Spock’s) or some unusual busyness (both of theirs). Often Spock would be able to give Jim warning that he wouldn’t be able to write, but sometimes there would only be silence and an explanation afterward. So that day when no message came, Jim didn’t worry; he just went ahead and wrote a message as usual, adding a note that he hoped Spock was okay. Then he listened to Spock’s song a few times and went to bed.

But the next day he got back from the university in the city to find his message box empty again.

This time, there was a prick of worry. Jim pushed it aside almost immediately. Spock had never missed two days in a row without warning, but there was no reason it couldn’t happen. Maybe one of his parents was ill, or he had been given an unexpected project to work on for school, or the communications were out at his home…

But it was no good trying to come up with the possibilities when he couldn’t find out. Jim banished the question from his mind, wrote his own letter, and went outside to work on the tree house.

The next day, though, the worry was harder to dismiss. Jim opened the empty message box and sat back in his desk chair, twirling a stylus and trying not to feel the panic that was encroaching upon him. Should he—well, there was nothing he could do. Spock had never given him contact information for anyone in his family, and in any case, it would be ridiculous to contact them. What would he say? “Sorry, Mr. Sarek and Mrs. Amanda, but your son hasn’t written me in three days and I just wanted to make sure he was okay?”

That night, it was harder to concentrate on the tree house.

A couple of days later Jim started to get really scared. There was no denying that something had happened—something bad to Spock, most likely, because why else would he be unable to write? Even if something had happened to his family, Spock would have found time to write a line or two, because he would have known Jim would worry. There were still other possibilities—even if Jim couldn’t always think of them—but illness or injury seemed the most likely. Spock was sick, or in pain, somewhere Jim couldn’t reach him.

Then there were the moments when Jim’s mind would whisper other things to him, suggesting not that Spock couldn’t write, but that he didn’t want to. _He doesn’t like you anymore,_ it would whisper. _He’s come to his senses and realized there’s nothing in you that a Vulcan could love, and that everything he ever felt for you was temporary insanity…_

Jim did his best to quash that voice when it showed up. But it was hard not to let it in at times and feel a coldness in the pit of his stomach.

***

By the time a week and a half had gone by, even Jim’s most level-headed efforts to cope had left him strained and on edge. It had just gone on so long: so many, many moments stacked on top of each other, each one of them without a message from Spock, each one filled with the possibility that something serious could have happened to him. And with each subsequent moment of silence, that possibility grew more likely.

It began to be very difficult to write to Spock. He almost didn’t want to: he couldn’t quite banish from his mind the image of a Spock who didn’t care anymore sitting in front of a message box, looking with condescension at the messages Jim had been foolish enough to send him. But if Spock was silent for other reasons, then Jim wanted him to know he hadn’t abandoned him.

And so Jim kept writing. But he had to constantly bite back words of anguish, of desperation—he had to keep his words calm while he himself was anything but.

_Spock, I hope you’re okay,_ most of his letters began. _Something interesting happened in the lab today…_

Day twelve of the silence was a Saturday. Jim did not have to go to work, but his mother had gone into the city for the day for a university function. Jim should have been working on the tree house—there were only a few little details left to go, and he could probably finish it this weekend—but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he sat on a living room couch and picked listlessly at a pillow.

_Spock is probably okay,_ he told himself for the thousandth time. And then, in answer to the other voice within him that spoke up immediately afterwards, _He told you he loves you. Listen to the song._ But the song came from the Spock of the past, and the Spock of the present was silent. Suffering, or in trouble, or ignoring him. The third possibility wasn’t likely—but the first two were worse.

Jim bit down on his lower lip. It was hard not to suspect that this was what insanity felt like. He needed to hear from Spock so badly it felt like he was being gutted. Even a single word would have helped. He could feel his insides twisting in the long silence, in the torture of the moments upon moments upon moments of nothing, of emptiness, of not having any idea _why…_

He squeezed the pillow to his chest. It didn’t really help, but then, nothing else did either. This was ridiculous. He shouldn’t be wasting this day—it was just two weeks before school started, and then it would be junior year, the busiest of all. He should at least be trying to finish the tree house. 

He threw the pillow down and heaved a sigh. _Just stand up, go outside, and everything will seem a little bit better…_

It was probably a lie, but at this point he would grasp at anything. He pulled himself up to a sitting position, heaved himself off the couch, and paused as his gaze was caught by something in the window.

There was a person standing in the driveway.


	13. Chapter 13

Jim squinted his eyes against the sun. The figure was far away, and he could only see its outline. Then the visitor took a step forward, and Jim knew.

He was off the couch so fast it might have been an ejector seat. His socks skidded on the hallway floor, and he stopped long enough to shove his feet into shoes. No laces—no time—and the door was open, gone behind him, and he was flying across the lawn, feet so far off the ground that the shoes didn’t even matter.

There was just time to see the figure at the end of the driveway look up. In an instant, a calm Vulcan face came to life, and then Jim was in his arms.

Spock was in his arms. Jim had his face buried in a soft neck and his arms were around a warm Vulcan frame he thought he might never hold again. He was clinging to him so hard he thought he might break him in half. “Spock,” he whispered into the skin of his shoulder. “Spock.”

Spock was gripping Jim as least as hard as Jim was him. Jim felt the fierce clasp of those arms around him, and it was as if something inside him were dissolving: some tight coiled barrenness of want and need and loneliness. Spock’s hold was making it all melt away.

He pulled his head back just far enough for him to see Spock’s face. “What are you—”

But he didn’t get to finish his question, because his mouth was seized in a sudden kiss.

The touch of Spock’s lips and tongue seemed to shoot straight through him, leaving every nerve standing at attention. The taste of Spock washed over him again. That taste transformed him: it turned every square inch of him into need, into desire. He slipped his hands into Spock’s hair and pulled their faces together as close as they could go so that their kisses could be deep enough to satisfy their hunger.

Oh, Spock’s tongue. He had forgotten—he had almost forgotten—how good it could feel when that tongue stroked against his own in that one special way. He had almost forgotten the soft way Spock’s lips moved against his even when they were sucking hungrily at each other’s mouths. Forgotten the feel of another body flush against his with hands in the small of his back, pulling him closer. He was drowning in it.

Some small part of Jim knew that they were standing at the end of the driveway, in full view of anyone who might walk by, but even so it was several minutes before he was willing to separate his mouth from Spock’s. Then they were both standing gasping, their foreheads pressed together. Jim lifted his hands to Spock’s face and ran his thumbs over his cheekbones. “Spock,” he whispered.

“Jim,” Spock’s deep voice responded. There was just a hint of a hitch in it, a hint of emotion. Jim found himself being pulled in closer again, so that they were wrapped in each other’s arms and just holding.

Jim felt as if he might easily stay here all day. Spock…Spock was here. Under his palms. Not light years away, not seen through the barrier of an LCD screen, but here. Real. Warm. Touchable. Jim rubbed his cheek against the fabric of a shoulder, and he heard Spock breathe in deeply.

He pulled back again to see Spock’s face. “Do you want to come inside?” he asked.

Spock’s eyes were dark and intent on his. Then they closed and he brushed his lips across Jim’s temple. Jim shuddered at the feel of Spock’s skin on his. He nosed against Spock’s cheek, found the corner of his mouth again, felt the rush of desire as his lips met wetness…

“Come on,” he gasped, and took Spock’s hand to lead him to the house.

The walk to the door lasted only a few seconds, but Jim could feel the charge of energy in the air. The air was nothing but energy. Jim felt tipped, turned upside down, lost in a haze of _Spock._ He tripped going up the front steps, felt Spock’s hand right him, almost melted into him right there on the threshold. But he resisted the pull, got them the last few feet inside.

Standing, dizzy, happy dream. His feet slipped out of his shoes. Spock knelt down, careful fingers working the laces of his boots. Jim stood close and ran a finger over a pointed ear. Spock’s head tipped up toward him, and Jim moved the caress down to his cheek. Eyes met and held. Jim moved his fingers down to the jawbone, stroking slowly across and then back up to the ear.

In one fluid motion Spock rose and they were kissing. Jim felt that sweep of relief again: the world was all right. This was the world, right here. This was the world he wanted to live in.

When their mouths separated, Spock drew a finger down the side of Jim’s face. “I have so missed being able to do this,” he said.

Jim led them toward the living room. He wasn’t sure what part of Spock he held at the moment. It didn’t seem to matter: it was all a haze of longing and belonging and touching and holding. Then they were in the middle of the living room and Jim got to turn and face him again, their whole fronts pressed against each other as they should always be, and Jim’s hands went to the sides of Spock’s face without thought, without conscious intention. Fingers moved through dark hair, thumbs made little circles on cheeks, and lips met.

“So,” Jim said into the little area of shared space between their mouths when there was a pause in kisses. “I’m guessing there’s a story here.”

Spock’s breath was shuddering. “Yes,” he breathed. His mouth tipped to the side and brushed against Jim’s cheek. “But I find—I do not have—the attention—”

His breath was gusting onto Jim’s face with a tingle that Jim felt all the way to his toes. “No,” he whispered. “I know what you mean.”

Their mouths closed the last few centimeters to meet in a kiss again. Hungry this time, like the one outside, so that Jim felt his pulse quicken almost immediately. He ran his hands up Spock’s sides and heard him breathe in sharply. Spock’s lips were moving against his: tongue licking at the corners of lips, making Jim’s mouth part and his breath come more quickly. 

It suddenly seemed very important that they reach the couch. Jim moved them towards it and tipped them onto it, not separating them, so that Spock was leaning back against the cushions and Jim was pressed against him, warmth against warmth, mouths still very much together.

The feeling of Spock beneath him seemed to fill Jim in places he didn’t know he had. He felt a pressure in his crotch and unbearable heat flickering up and down his skin. The _need,_ oh, the need, it was mounting with every second that Spock ran his fingers over his back.

He found the space where Spock’s shirt met his pants. His hands crept in and stroked up, eager for touch, and Spock lifted his back and raised his arms so that his shirt lifted off over his head and Jim could _feel_ all the skin that had been under it. He had never had Spock beneath him without a shirt before. Jim ran his fingers through the sprinkling of dark hair on his chest. His skin looked so good—good enough to taste—and he brought his mouth down to it. He licked and sucked and was amazed that such a thing could feel so good, could send such waves of elation through him.

He stroked against a nipple and heard Spock make a groaning sound. He wanted to hear that again, so he moved his mouth to the nipple and touched it with his tongue. Spock gripped his shoulders with his hands and arched up so that Jim could feel his hardness against his stomach. It made Jim gasp, and he sucked down on the nipple hard enough that Spock groaned again.

Hands were under his shirt now. He straightened up so that Spock could lift it over his head. He watched Spock looking at his chest, his eyes wanton, hazy. Spock’s finger trailed down his chest, where the skin was tan from hours spent outside. “You are so golden,” he said, voice made breathy with want and wonder, and then he looked back up at Jim’s face, and they didn’t break eye contact until their mouths met in another kiss.

This kiss was not gentle. It began hungry and built quickly, as their chests slid together and their hips moved minutely, just enough to give themselves enough stimulation to be bearable. Jim felt every touch of Spock’s lips and every trailing touch of his fingers on his skin go straight to the tip of his cock, as if all nerves were radiating from there. He wanted—he _wanted_ —

Then suddenly Spock pulled back from the kiss and met his gaze, and he knew beyond doubt that Spock wanted the same thing. It was there in those dark eyes. Their gazes locked, and Spock nodded. His hands went to the clasp of Jim’s pants.

Jim felt his own fingers fumbling as they undid Spock’s button and fly. Then they had to separate long enough to slip their pants to the floor. Jim’s eyes fixed on the bulge at Spock’s crotch.

Spock was leaning back against the pillows again. Jim reached out a trembling hand and touched his fingertips to that cloth-covered bulge. Spock moaned softly at the touch. Jim slipped his fingers under the band of Spock’s briefs and lifted them free.

Spock’s penis. It was the first Jim had ever seen in this state, beside his own—the first he had ever wanted to see. To touch. It was long and thick and faintly green, with a double set of ridges at the top. Jim had the strangest desire to put his mouth over it, to take it all into himself, but Spock’s hands were at his boxers now. His fingers brushed against Jim’s cock and Jim cried out involuntarily.

Boxers fell beside briefs on the floor, and Jim’s hands were back on Spock, on his back and sides and chest and their mouths together. He would do anything with this body in his arms—anything with this body and—oh!

Spock pulled him towards him so that their groins met. The scrape of cock against cock shot through Jim’s body with such a burst of white light that he felt himself falling backwards. Spock fell with him, and both of them were scrambling for more of that contact—more of that touch that shot through them like fire, like lightning, like the dissolution of all their particles—

They found it. Spock’s organ came into place beside Jim’s, and then everything came into place, every single piece of the universe lining up into the motion of one against the other. The friction of Spock against him, of his long, strong cock rubbing up and down with such rhythm, was enough to make Jim tremble and turn his world into a maelstrom of light. He found Spock’s mouth again and kissed it fully, urgently, as his hips jerked up in that inevitable rhythm that was so good that it would be theirs forever. Never to change—to be theirs always—always—together and more and faster and faster and—

The world burst apart, such pleasure flying through Jim that he cried out and gripped Spock’s sides hard enough to leave marks. Above him he felt Spock tremble in the same eruption, and then fall, fall onto him, one with him, joined by this change that was ripping through them. One.

It was several long moments before the world cleared and Jim was aware of anything again. He was lying back against the pillows at one end of the couch and clutching Spock to his chest. Spock’s head lay on his sternum, right above his heart.

Bone-deep happiness. That’s what this feeling was. Jim let his fingers roam up Spock’s back, into his hair, down his arm. Spock. They had just done this together, and now Jim got to lie with Spock in his arms. He felt a desire never to have to separate from this body. To absorb Spock’s body into his own and carry him around under his own skin, so they could be one forever.

“I’ve enrolled in Starfleet Academy,” Spock said into the skin just above his left nipple.

Jim’s fingers stopped in their circuit of Spock’s body. “What?” he said.

Spock’s head moved slightly, tilting upward so that Jim could see a bit of his face. “I have enrolled in Starfleet Academy,” he repeated. “Classes begin on Monday.”

_“Spock!”_ Jim felt his face break out in a smile, and he bounded up into a sitting position so they could see each other’s faces.

Just as quickly, though, his smile faded. “But what about…Spock, I can’t ask you to give up your dream,” he said softly.

Their legs were still tangled together, and Spock looked down at Jim’s thigh, where his own hand rested. “I found…that the VSA would not be able to fulfill all my needs,” he said carefully.

“Spock.” Jim put his hand under Spock’s chin and tipped it up. “Are you sure? Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “This is basically the best news I’ve heard all year. But I know how much the VSA meant to you. I don’t want you to make that sacrifice…”

Spock’s eyes came up to meet his, bright under their fringe of lashes. “I will not deny that you had some role to play in my decision. But there were other factors. I discovered that life on my own planet, without the possibility of exploration, would not be enough for me.” His thumb rubbed circles on Jim’s thigh. “I want you,” he said, “but I also want the stars.”

For a moment Jim could only look at him, speechless. Then he grabbed him and kissed him, tumbling him about so that they both ended up lying on the couch again, Spock underneath Jim as Jim plundered his mouth.

A moment later he pulled back. “How could you not tell me about this, you sneak?” he asked, the grin on his face ruining the effect of his indignation. “I just about died here worrying—”

Spock looked faintly abashed. “I...I did not know how to tell you, at first,” he said. “I was not sure of my own motivations, and I did not want to create in you unfounded hopes. Then, once I had decided…” He dropped his eyes. “I decided to surprise you,” he finished in a quiet voice.

“Illogical,” Jim said with a laugh. “I’m clearly having a bad influence on you.” He nudged his nose into Spock’s neck. “You louse. I thought you were dead or something.”

“I did miscalculate in my choice of transport ship,” Spock admitted. “In my haste, I failed to make certain that I chose one with personal subspace communication capabilities.”

“Don’t worry.” Jim kissed along Spock’s jaw, “I’ll find a way to make you make that up to me later.” He propped himself up on his elbows and grinned down happily at Spock’s face below him. “So, the next four years, you’ll be here?”

Spock looked up at him with the eyes of innocence. “If by ‘here’ you mean Iowa, then I must say you are incorrect,” he said. “But if by ‘here’ you mean our positions relative to one another on this couch, then yes, I can say that I intend to spend much of the next four years exactly here.”

It took about one second of disbelief for Jim to start laughing. He pulled Spock properly into his arms with such gusto that they almost rolled off the couch.

Their mouths met again, and the kiss was a serious one that banished Jim’s laughter. Spock—on Earth—for the next four years—he felt the miracle of it suffuse him. That this mouth would be his, that this body would be his to hold and to touch… He felt every inch of Spock’s naked body beneath his, Spock’s cock slowly hardening against his own as the force of their kisses grew.

“I love you,” Jim whispered in a pause between kisses. Spock responded by sucking Jim’s tongue back into his mouth and kissing him until Jim was lost in a happy haze.

Suddenly Jim detached himself and slid down Spock’s body. He felt Spock tense slightly.

“What are you doing?” Spock asked, propping himself on an elbow to look down.

Jim grinned up at him. “I just wanted to try something,” he said. And he lowered his mouth onto the tip of Spock’s penis.

“Oh!” Spock cried as he fell back onto the cushions. “Jim!”

Jim was licking his way down Spock’s length. It tasted—sharp, but not bad. An addictive taste, he thought. He felt his own cock hardening fully as he tongued up along the veins and the ridges.

Spock was whimpering. Jim took the head of the penis in his mouth and sucked, and Spock arched up into his mouth so that he had to move back quickly to avoid injury. He could only get about half of Spock’s penis into his mouth before his gag reflex threatened—but he assumed he’d get better at that with practice. He used his hand to cover the rest of the shaft, and he alternated between sucking and licking up and down.

“Jim! Yes! More! More!” The sound of Spock’s cries and the taste of Spock’s penis in his mouth were enough to make Jim stab his own cock into the couch to quell his sudden need. Spock was quivering now and thrusting into Jim’s mouth, so he switched to moving up and down the penis in rhythm, compensating at the base with one hand and using the other to cradle Spock’s balls. It took only about a minute of that before Spock came with a cry, spurting semen into Jim’s throat. He gave the quivering member a final lick and took his mouth away. He ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth. Sweet—addictive.

Spock looked totally undone. He was lying on the cushions with hair awry, arms and legs looking utterly useless. Jim laughed and slid back into place alongside him. His own cock was still hard against Spock’s leg, but they could deal with that later.

“You enjoyed that?” he whispered.

Spock’s face still showed amazement. “I did not know that that was something people could do to one another.”

Jim laughed again and nuzzled Spock’s shoulder. Spock lifted a hand and brushed it lightly against Jim’s penis, making him tense and form his mouth into a small _oh_ against Spock’s skin.

“Would you like me to do the same for you?” he asked Jim softly.

Spock’s fingers were trailing up and down Jim’s penis, spiraling out tendrils of delight. It was all he could do to nod.

He felt Spock leave him and slide down the couch. He felt temporarily bereft without Spock’s body next to him, but the next moment Spock’s mouth came down over the head of his cock and sent a wave of pleasure shooting through him. He was fairly certain he cried out, but it was hard to be sure, because the next minute Spock was sucking up and down his shaft, and that erased everything else. Spock’s words echoed in his mind: he had not known…he had not known people could do this to each other…

The pleasure was so great that Jim could not lie still. He arched, trying not to thrust into Spock’s mouth and failing. His hand came down to run through the dark hair. “Spock,” he cried in a strangled voice, almost in protest, but not really, because he would never protest this, never. He wanted this to go on for always.

Spock’s lips slid against the shaft as he sucked, and Jim felt the tightening in his balls that meant he was not going to last long. “Spock!” he cried out again as his orgasm rolled towards him. It took him with blinding force, and it held him for long moments, his mind centered on the feel of Spock’s tongue lazily licking up the seed from his shaft.

A minute later Spock was back beside him, and for long minutes they kissed slowly, languidly. There were practicalities to take care of: their first emissions were still drying on their stomachs, and Jim had no doubt the couch was a mess. But he had never before been so blindingly happy.

“Love you,” he whispered again into a pointed ear.

Spock pulled back to look him in the face. Jim saw that expression in Spock’s eyes he had come to value so much: that look of unfettered desire, of happiness, that made him want to melt. Spock’s hand came to rest on his cheek. “I love you as well,” he murmured in a low voice that rumbled through Jim’s chest.

Jim smiled broadly. Just when he thought he was the happiest he could possibly be, he discovered there were further heights to be reached. He kissed Spock full on the mouth again and lingered there. Then he pulled away and grinned.

“I almost forgot,” he said. “I have something to show you.”


	14. Chapter 14

“Look,” Jim said as he led Spock out to the backyard.

They stopped in front of the maple, where the nearly finished tree house wound up and through the leaves. Spock caught Jim’s hand and rubbed a fingertip against the palm before lacing their fingers together. “I see that you have built me a house,” he said.

Jim dug his elbow into Spock’s side. “Who says it’s for you?”

Spock turned towards him with an eyebrow raised. “Ah,” he said, “in that case, I will have to conquer it.” He let go of Jim’s hand and took a few steps around the tree, scoping out the house. “Tell me, what are the traditional methods of conquering a tree house?”

“Hey, if you don’t know, then I’m certainly not going to tell you,” Jim said. He caught hold of the rope ladder and climbed up to the first level.

“That is unfortunate,” Spock said from the ladder behind him. “My secondary education was singularly weak on the subject of conquest, and my Starfleet courses do not start until next week.”

“Eh, you’ll just be Science track, anyway,” Jim said. “You won’t learn anything useful.”

Spock reached the platform and fixed Jim with a look. “I hope you recall those words the first time your starship is menaced by a phenomenon of unknown origin.”

Jim grinned at him. “When I’m a Starship captain, I promise to come to you with all of my baffling space phenomena.” He dropped a kiss on Spock’s mouth, and Spock caught him around the waist momentarily.

“Tell me,” he murmured, “This house you’ve build in a tree...is the ground particularly dangerous in this region?”

Jim laughed and sank into Spock’s mouth for a moment. Then he spun away and started clambering up the stairs to the second level, Spock right behind him

Giving a tour of a tree house was one of the more fun things Jim had done in his life. He showed Spock the enclosed second platform, the hidden storage areas, the lookout post, the hanging bridge to the highest level. “The railing on the top level isn’t finished yet,” he said. “Shoddy human craftsmanship and all that.”

Spock followed him up to the top level where the dancing leaves cast patterns of green and gold. He closed the distance between them and enfolded Jim in his arms. “You amaze me,” he said softly, his thumb drawing a line down the side of Jim’s face. “I confess I did not expect those sketches on the blackboard to become a reality. And yet it is not wholly surprising, coming from you.”

Jim felt the warmth of Spock’s gaze all through him. He tipped his head back and caught Spock’s lips. “This,” he said after a moment of kissing, “was not the greatest dream of mine that became a reality this year.”

They soon discovered that the highest platform was the perfect size for two people to stretch out on full-length, and that kissing each other’s skin was even better in the dappled light of the sun through the leaves.

“Is your mother away from home?” Spock asked a short time later when they were lying on their backs looking up at the leaves, Jim’s head pillowed on Spock’s shoulder.

Jim laughed. “What was your first clue?” he asked. “Yeah, she’s at some event at the university.”

“Ah yes, she is a professor there,” Spock said.

“Yeah, she’s gone a lot, what with our living this far from the city,” Jim said. “But she thought it was important, me growing up in a place where there were still trees and nature around.” He closed his eyes and felt the breeze playing across his face. He could feel the warmth of Spock’s skin against his cheek, through the thin fabric of his shirt. “What about your parents?” he asked. “Your dad must be gone a lot, being an ambassador.”

It was a few seconds before he realized Spock had gone still. “Spock?” Jim asked. He rolled up on his elbow to look at Spock’s face. It was rigid, stiff, the way it had been that first night in the classroom when Jim had made that comment about him being different from other Vulcans.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Jim said softly. He touched his fingers to Spock’s cheek. “I didn’t mean to upset you. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

It looked like it took Spock an enormous effort to move his lips to form a response. “I apologize,” he said through that frozen mask. “It is merely recent events which have made the subject difficult to talk about.”

“What happened?” Jim asked.

Spock’s eyes were trained on the leaves above their heads. “You must understand that it is very important to my parents that I live my life as a Vulcan. My mother is naturally more flexible on the point, but my father...he has always been very pleased by me and my accomplishments on Vulcan.” His chest rose and fell against Jim as he took a breath. “When I told him of my decision to decline my spot at Vulcan Science Academy and join Starfleet, he informed me that we would no longer be in communication.”

“Spock!” Jim exclaimed. He gripped his upper arm. “That’s horrible.”

“It is not so very surprising,” Spock said. “In joining Starfleet, I am in effect disavowing many of the hopes with which he raised me and the work he did to make me a full Vulcan. It is understandable that he should reject this decision.”

His eyes met Jim’s, and despite his words, he looked very young. Vulnerable. Jim touched his cheek with his fingertips. “But he shouldn’t reject you,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Vulcan, or human, or both, or neither. You’re Spock.” His fingers played over Spock’s cheek, temple. “And I love you.”

Spock held his gaze for a long moment. “Thank you, Jim,” he said at last. He blinked. “I apologize for acting so emotional. It is merely the recentness of events...”

Jim lay his head back on Spock’s shoulder and wrapped his arm around him. “You don’t need to apologize to me for that,” he said. “I’ll never ask you to be anything but what you are.”

He held onto Spock for a long time as the rigidity in his body slowly eased away. The shadows had moved visibly across the platform when Jim turned his head and kissed the skin of Spock’s shoulder. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving,” he said, rolling up onto Spock’s chest. “Want to come in for dinner?”

The spark of humor was back in Spock’s eyes. “Are you inviting me to share in a traditional human date?”

Jim grinned. “The dinner, maybe,” he said, rolling off Spock and standing up. “But if you’re going to be hanging around on Earth, you should know that most traditional dates don’t start with sex on the couch.”

***

Jim set them to work making stir fry. “You just cut up the onions like this,” he said to Spock, who was standing behind him with his breath warm on Jim’s neck. He turned around in the small space between the counter and Spock’s body behind him. “Here, you do that, and I’ll go wash the peppers—”

He was cut off when Spock dropped the knife and took him in a sudden kiss.

The unexpected feel of Spock’s tongue in his mouth took Jim off guard, and he felt a sharp spike of arousal. He dropped the peppers he was holding and wrapped his arms around Spock. He moved him backwards, pushing him back against the wall of cabinets behind them. The feel of him pressed there, all of his body hot against Jim’s and the speed of their kisses accelerating—

The phone rang just inches from Jim’s ear.

He broke off the kiss and pulled back from Spock, breathing heavily. For a moment they held eye contact, the air still charged, until Spock cocked his head. “Do you intend to answer that?”

Jim reached for the phone without breaking eye contact. “Hello?” he said into the receiver.

“Jim!” came a voice on the other end.

“Oh, hi, Mom,” he said, dropping his eyes from Spock’s. He turned and leaned against the cabinets next to him

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You sound like you’ve been running.”

“Yeah, I heard the phone from outside,” Jim said. He could see Spock’s eyebrow go up, but he ignored it. “What’s up?”

“Well, this event is going later than I expected,” she said. “It looks like I’m going to have to spend the night in my rooms here.”

Jim took a second to make sure his voice wouldn’t sound too overjoyed when he answered. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right there?” his mom asked. She sounded worried and guilty, which was basically the opposite of what Jim was feeling at the moment. Spock was pressing closer to him, their hips and thighs together. Jim could feel their warmth infecting his blood.

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“All right,” she said. “Call me if you need me.”

Jim hung up the phone and turned to look at Spock, who looked back with eyes that were dark and serious. “So,” he said, “it looks like my mom won’t be coming back tonight.”

Spock looked back at him silently. Their legs were still touching.

Jim leaned in to press his lips to Spock’s neck. “Know of anyone else I might be able to convince to stay over with me?” he murmured.

Spock’s hands strayed down Jim’s back. “I will give the matter some thought,” he said into Jim’s hair.

Jim raised his head and found his mouth again. Their kisses started out slow and quickly became more serious than the ones in the tree house. It bordered on miraculous that they ended up sitting down to dinner at all.

Jim had set up the table with one of his mom’s fancy table cloths, and he couldn’t quite help himself from running his foot up the side of Spock’s leg when they sat down.

Spock looked at him with that burning look in his eyes that always made Jim’s stomach kindle to fire. “I calculate ninety-three percent odds that this sort of enjoyment will impede our consumption of the meal in front of us.”

Jim laughed. “Hands to myself, I promise.”

He kept that promise until they had each eaten most of their food, and there were just a few vegetables left on Spock’s plate. Then he found it perfectly natural to pick up some of the remnants with his fingers and slip them between Spock’s lips. Spock accepted them with his eyes shut, and Jim let his fingers linger on Spock’s lips and tongue. Then it was his turn to feel Spock’s fingers pushing gently between his lips, to let his tongue taste Spock’s fingertips before they were withdrawn. He opened his eyes to find Spock looking at him in silence.

“Want to experience Iowa starlight?” Jim asked.

***

They strolled out into the field behind Jim’s house. It wasn’t quite dark yet, just the pale gray of late evening, and the air was perfect: not too warm or too cool, just resting with a gentle touch on their skin. They walked hand in hand and talked about Spock’s upcoming courses. Mostly science, of course, but there were courses all cadets were required to take.

“Well, I’m jealous,” Jim said. “I can borrow your Command Tactics textbook, right?”

Spock raised an eyebrow. “I fear you will have an unfair advantage over the other applicants in a few years,” he said. “It is not every aspiring student who has such regular access to a cadet.”

“Regular access, huh?” Jim said with a grin “I intend to take advantage of that as often as I can.”

Spock looked down at him with amusement in his eyes. “The point is moot, however,” he said, “as I am not yet in possession of the book.” He stroked his thumb along Jim’s palm. “I had other priorities upon my arrival on Earth.”

The sky darkened, and the blackness was dusted with millions of tiny lights. The two of them strolled down to the end of the lawn proper, where a stone wall cut across the field.

Jim tipped his head back to look at the stars. He felt, as he always did, a flare of wonder at the thought that each was a massive star with planets of its own, that millions of individual worlds waited up there. That wass what they would explore someday...

When he looked back down, Spock was sitting on the stone wall, his face towards the woods that spread for miles behind the fields. Jim came behind him and put his arms around him.

Spock leaned back into the embrace. For long minutes they stayed like that, Jim breathing Spock in. The feel of Spock in his arms...the feeling had so quickly become rooted in Jim’s body, so that now it would be a hardship to ever go without it again. In so few hours, he had absorbed it and made it part of himself.

“This is an unjust position,” Spock murmured in the silence.

“What do you mean?” Jim asked.

“You can hold me, but I am unable to hold you.”

Jim laughed and kissed the side of his face. Spock turned around in the circle of his arms, swinging his legs over the side of the wall so that Jim was standing between them. The wall was high enough so that Spock was only about a head lower than Jim in their current positions. His face was tipped up towards Jim’s, catching the starlight.

Jim beheld it with a sudden intake of breath. These features—they were probably not what a stranger would call classically beautiful, but Jim didn’t think he’d ever seen anything that struck him more deeply. He was filled suddenly with the assurance, strange as it was, that though the universe might be filled with millions upon millions of worlds, he had somehow found the best part.

“How did this happen?” he asked out loud, without quite intending to. “How did we find each other?”

Spock’s eyes looked up into his. “You asked me that once before,” he said. “I find it no less astonishing than I did then.”

They were close enough that Spock’s breath brushed against his lips. Jim gave into inevitability and lowered his lips to take Spock’s mouth. He drank from it, and he pulled their bodies closer together so that Spock was pressed against the full length of his torso.

The heat of Spock’s skin soaked through his whole body. Jim moved his lips over the rest of that face, Spock’s face, loving his cheekbones and nose and jawline. The skin was soft and smooth under Jim’s lips, and his only regret was that he couldn’t have it all at once, couldn’t kiss every inch of it at the same time...

“Jim,” Spock said in a gasping voice, “may I make an inquiry?”

“Mm?” Jim answered. His lips were expressing their appreciation for Spock’s ear, lingering on the soft velvety tissue of the tip.

“Have you ever...been with a female?”

Jim pulled back and looked at Spock in surprise. He looked—well, it wasn’t the rigid Vulcan mask, but he was clearly schooling his features to be deliberately emotionless.

“No,” Jim said. He fought back the urge to laugh before Spock’s seriousness. “Not in the way I think you mean, anyway. Would it matter if I had?”

“Logically, it would not,” Spock answered. His eyes were down, looking somewhere around Jim’s chest. “Yet I found myself nonetheless interested in your answer.”

Jim laughed. “No, I’ve never been with a girl,” he said again. “Not like,” he bent to plant a kiss on Spock’s lips, “I was with you today.” He kissed him again. “However, I have kissed lots of them.”

“Ah.” Spock’s eyes dropped, then looked up again. “And did you find the experience...pleasing?”

“I did,” Jim said lightly. “However,” he dropped another kiss on Spock’s lips, then held his eyes and dropped his voice, “there is no comparison.”

He watched Spock’s face as he took in the words. Then he bent down and melted their lips together

Spock’s back arched under his hands, the tissue pliable, straining up towards him. Jim placed one hand on the small of Spock’s back, one on the back of his head, and kissed him as deeply as could ever be possible.

The touch of their tongues spread a wave of heat throughout his body. He strained forward, reaching for all of Spock that he could grasp. Their lips and tongues gained in speed and hunger. Spock’s legs came up around Jim’s waist. Jim felt Spock’s hardness against his thigh, felt his own pressing into Spock’s flesh.

A low moan came from Spock’s throat as their tongues tussled together. “Oh, God, Spock,” Jim murmured. He managed to break the kiss and pressed his face into Spock’s hair. “Come upstairs with me?” he gasped.

The walk back across the lawn passed in a dream of distraction: Jim’s head was too full of the taste and feel of Spock to notice the sights and sounds of the night. They reached the house, and once they were inside, Jim grabbed Spock or Spock grabbed Jim or both at once and they were in each other’s arms again. The kisses Jim drew from Spock’s mouth were urgent, hungry, half-frantic. He backed them toward the stairs, and they climbed up, no longer kissing, but hands were everywhere, touching was necessary, Jim could not wait, needed to touch all of Spock, needed Spock against him...

Jim’s room. Jim shut the door behind them, and there was a single moment when everything hung suspended. The light of the stars and the moon came in the window and cast everything in silver. They stood, chests heaving and eyes meeting across the silver air. Then they were kissing again.

Spock was firm against Jim’s body. The sweet liquid of arousal in Jim’s blood would not let him be away from Spock, and the same hunger was in Spock’s hands on him, Spock’s tongue in his mouth. Skin—they needed skin—

Spock’s shirt came off over his head. Jim’s was right after it, and bare chests pressed together, straining for closeness. Their tongues were fierce; they gained a rhythm that set Jim’s blood on fire. Spock gripped his buttocks and made him cry out and clutch Spock even tighter.

His cock was pulsing against Spock’s leg. Jim slipped a hand in between them and palmed the front of Spock’s pants, where he could feel a hard rod jutting out at him.

Spock shuddered and gave a cry. Jim’s hands went to the fastenings of Spock’s pants, fingers working to reveal what he had held before and wanted to possess again. Wanted to hear Spock make that sound again, make him moan and writhe... Spock’s hands were doing the same, and soon both their pants were around their ankles and forgotten. Aching cocks strained together through thin layers of underclothes.

Their mouths sealed together again in a fierce kiss. Jim’s penis twitched against Spock’s, sending little shots of pleasure through him, and it was all he could do not to rut against him right then, ride this wave of want to the end. But that wasn’t all he wanted to do this time. In his head was an image of what could be, and it made the blood pound in his ears.

“Spock,” he whispered as he clutched him to him. “Spock. I want...”

He couldn’t finish the sentence, but his hand trailed down Spock’s back and under his briefs. They found the crevice there and pressed down it towards a quivering opening.

Spock moaned at the touch.”I...yes, Jim, yes, yes,” he said.

Jim responded by pressing harder so that the tip of his finger slipped inside. Their bodies were welded together, kissing desperately, and yet somehow briefs and boxers were skimmed off and thrown to the side. Spock was moaning as Jim’s finger ringed his hole.

The bed. Jim moved Spock towards it, moved himself, because he felt he would go crazy if they weren’t touching. He reached a hand blindly into the night table and found the little tube he was looking for.

Spock was kissing him again before he could get it open. Jim unscrewed the cap with his hands behind Spock’s back and squirted some of the contents onto his fingers. One single finger first—

He slid it inside.

Spock shuddered at that first entrance. He broke off the kiss and lowered his head onto Jim’s shoulder and stood there panting. Jim paused, afraid that he was hurting him. But then Spock pushed down on the finger, forcing it further in, and Jim realized that it was pleasure, not pain, that had him overwhelmed. He slid a second finger in beside the first, feeling the lube slick against the walls of the passage. Spock was clutching at him, holding him hard enough to bruise, but Jim didn’t care. His fingers were inside Spock’s ass and Spock was clenching down on them...

The aching of his cock made him pull his fingers out and spread them with more lube. Now it was his cock that he touched, squeezing hard at the base to keep himself from going over the edge, then running his fingers up the shaft. He looked up and saw Spock’s eyes watching, dark and hungry.

“Ready?” Jim asked in a whisper.

Spock nodded, his eyes still on Jim’s cock.

They toppled down onto the bed. Face to face, because Jim could not imagine turning him, not at this moment. He wanted Spock’s face. Wanted his chest, and his arms, and his legs, and his everything.

Spock’s knees fell apart and Jim felt he would come right there, just from the sight. He lowered his tongue into Spock’s mouth, practically fucked him with his tongue, but it wasn’t his tongue that needed it. He could feel the opening, the tip of his cock just against it, the nerves there on fire...

He gave a push. The muscle at the base of the lubricated opening gave way, and the very tip of him slid inside. Jim gave a gasp and met Spock’s eyes. He could feel the astonishment, the amazement on his own face, and he saw it reflected in Spock’s. He pushed in farther, and his vision blurred, and he felt Spock’s chest beneath his hands, Spock’s legs around him, but mostly himself inside Spock—all the way inside now, pushing as far as he could go and he was in him and they were one now and he opened his eyes and saw the wonder in Spock’s eyes.

He moved a little, drawing his cock back out, and had to pause and gasp at the feeling. The firm muscle all around his cock...so much better than—than anything ever had been before...

He put his hand around Spock’s penis and stroked as he draw himself out, then pushed back in again. Spock arched on the bed and moaned. Jim thrust again, faster now, and the rhythm took him. He wanted this, just this feeling, forever. Spock’s hand on his sweat-slick chest. His own hand around Spock’s penis, feeling the pre-cum, not really able to finesse but just pumping, pumping, as he slid in and out of Spock’s channel and felt the pleasure shoot through his body like the explosions of fireworks.

The world was crumbling now. Nothing could hang together in this maelstrom of pleasure, of wonder, of Spock. Jim could feel his balls tightening as he thrust, and thrust, and thrust. It was skin against skin, it was ( _Oh!_ ) it was Spock’s face contorting, it was pleasure shaking him down to his toes, it was better than he could possibly bear, it was—

“Spock!” he cried with the last shreds of his mind, and the world tumbled down upon them. 

***

The sun was coming through the window the next morning when Jim awoke. For the first moment after waking he felt only the sleepiness of early morning, full of warmth and contentment—and then he realized there was a body pressed against his back, and a stronger happiness flooded in and took hold.

He turned languidly around and saw the warm brown of Spock’s eyes looking back at him. “Good morning,” Spock said in his deep voice.

Jim leaned forward and tasted Spock’s lips again, felt them mold to his own. “God, you’re good to wake up to,” he murmured.

“As are you.” Spock’s lips and tongue were soft. “I believe your mother will be returning soon,” he said between kisses.

“Mm.” Jim slipped his tongue back under Spock’s, stroked along it. “I guess we should probably do something about that.”

The naked skin of Spock’s stomach quivered under Jim’s fingertips. In a few minutes they would have to get up, would have to get dressed and say goodbye again—but not like last time. This time, Jim wasn’t worried.

Spock was his; and it was only the beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank you all for the wonderful things you've said about this story -- it's really meant a lot. You're making me want to write more about this pair!


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